tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60280732024-03-05T16:57:49.862+00:00An Spailpín FánachBehave yourself, you spailpín fánach!An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comBlogger1078125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-1281763842577203672021-01-31T14:41:00.002+00:002021-01-31T14:41:59.189+00:00We've Moved<h1 style="text-align: left;">The site has moved from blogspot to its own url, <a href="https://anspailpinfanach.com">https://anspailpinfanach.com</a>. Taking you there now in seven seconds or less ...</h1>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-52889750059301792462020-11-30T09:00:00.022+00:002020-11-30T09:00:03.394+00:00A Covid-19 Christmas<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm6xgydzq21gm_hTbvXfODiZPyaZh1QhEP_V3w854_2tqjHJH8ssJpELJ1fqPhJ8O7SqYKTSJ6cNMAZfDnGSs7mEkyY_haqqX4qU9Sg2-Pz51G78hbHwXUvZdgWAaYthYumfz6/s2048/coronavirus-oconnell-st-deserted.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm6xgydzq21gm_hTbvXfODiZPyaZh1QhEP_V3w854_2tqjHJH8ssJpELJ1fqPhJ8O7SqYKTSJ6cNMAZfDnGSs7mEkyY_haqqX4qU9Sg2-Pz51G78hbHwXUvZdgWAaYthYumfz6/w400-h225/coronavirus-oconnell-st-deserted.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />There are two schools of thought in dealing with a pandemic. There is the medical, which favours shutting everything down, never leaving the house, and boiling your extremities daily. And there is the economic, the laissez-faire capitalism approach where people die or do not, and the state has no part to play other than ensuring that the process of buying and selling continues uninterrupted.<p></p><p>The government have done some in-and-out running with regard to which school they’re following in their pandemic strategy. In April or May, at the end of first, full-duck lockdown, Taoiseach Varadkar believed nothing could be so terrible as to open up and then have to close again. When Doctor Holohan returned to NPHET and advised that the lockdown needed to be tightened in October, Tánaiste Varadkar pronounced that the advisers advise and governments govern, and that should be the end of it. Doctor Holohan’s advice was implemented two weeks later.</p><p>Now the government are four-square behind a different Christmas, but a good Christmas. A Christmas Ryan Tubridy can be proud of, and with no gloomy medicos acting as bad-news bears to spoil everybody’s fun.</p><p>Does the government ever wonder if Covid-19, the novel coronavirus, know it’s Christmastime at all? Is the government at all concerned whether or not Covid-19, the novel coronavirus, can tell if any particular environment is a wet pub or the perfume counter in Brown Thomas?</p><p>The government is betting that the people’s need for a “normal” Christmas, and the economy’s need for Christmas business, is greater than both the people’s intolerance of a third lockdown or the potential crisis caused by the HSE’s unknown ability to deal with a surge of post-Christmas cases.</p><p>Pat Leahy made the case for the economic benefit in a <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/pat-leahy-government-right-to-exert-its-authority-over-nphet-1.4421593">recent Irish Times column</a>. The problem is that those economic arguments were no less true during the time the government locked down as they are now when it wants to lift lockdown. What is different? What is it about now that is was not the case a month ago, other than political opportunity? Could we, perhaps, save some money by not burning it on the altar of the Children’s Hospital instead?</p><p>On the people tolerating another lockdown, that seems to be a fifty-fifty proposition if an <i>Ireland Thinks</i> poll in yesterday’s <i>Mail on Sunday</i> is to be believed. If Ireland Thinks polling is anything like their website that may not be a worry. If the poll is on the level, then the government, and the political establishment in general, have badly misjudged the public mood.</p><p>How much the government suffer in consequence of this depends on how much the people suffer, which itself depends on how toasty things get for the HSE.</p><p>The HSE is not having a good pandemic. The HSE doesn’t do well in normal times – what hope have they in times of pandemic? This is under-reported in the press. There may be different reasons for this, but there can be no doubt that the government are handing out green jerseys at official and unofficial briefings morning, noon and night, and urging the media to “act responsibly” for the good of the nation.</p><p>But keeping schtum on the dysfunction of the Health Service does not serve the good of the nation. It serves the good of those who benefit from that dysfunction, to the detriment of the good of the nation. The media can only serve the good of the nation by keeping the nation informed of what the nation needs to know. And the nation needs to know that if there is a spike in cases to which the government is slow to respond, RIP.ie is likely to see a lot of business.</p><p>The argument against this is that the virus is not as deadly as it was. There are two possible reasons for this. The first is that the virus has mutated, about which your correspondent knows nothing, quite frankly. The second is that treatment has improved as the medical world has had a year to study the thing. This is demonstrably true.</p><p>Against this is the remarkable sloth and inertia of the Health Service in Ireland. Change comes dropping slow in the HSE. Its ability to triage cases in an epidemic situation has never been tested but reader, as it creaks so badly at the best of times, what hope has it of surviving the worst?</p><p>A state’s ability to ease lockdowns in times of epidemic is proportional to the state’s ability to trace outbreaks to their origin. In New Zealand, they’re able to <a href="https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-data-and-statistics/covid-19-source-cases">trace down to the cluster</a>. Thirteen cases at a wedding in Wellington. Twenty-five cases at the Ruby Princess Cruise Ship in Hawke’s Bay. </p><p>The highlight of Ireland’s case-tracing came in August of this year, when we managed to trace an outbreak to somewhere in Offaly, Laois, or Kildare. This does little for confidence in an agile response to a post-Christmas outbreak.</p><p>The importance of speed of response, again, is critical because of the speed with which the virus is propagated. A quick example. Let’s say you decided to walk north up O’Connell Street, and give yourself six minutes to do it, which is about what it takes at an average walking speed of five kilometres an hour.</p><p>If you travel at that speed, after three minutes you’re a little past the spire and the next three will see you at Parnell Street. But if you’re not travelling at that speed – if you’re travelling at an R-number of 1.1, say – you reach the spire only after 5 minutes, 53 seconds. You then cover the remaining half of the street in seven seconds. In another minute, that rate of acceleration will have you in Belfast.</p><p>The R-number doesn’t map exactly to rates of cases, of course, but it is useful in showing how quickly a health system can be overwhelmed if infections aren’t spotted and dealt with it in time. 5’53” to the Spire. Seven seconds the rest of the way. One minute more to Belfast. Happy Christmas.</p>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-70700317221895767632020-11-08T12:00:00.029+00:002020-11-08T12:00:04.147+00:00The Ballad of Football Jesus<div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF7nw6VMjHzAHrvm9aIetEOebBPkuFK3eNmnBTSdXlVIXEvUTexYyiFNAfFf2aes_cse_YIbr23shwGjHPj2T4j3dgdI2qDArxotCxAkqTdsU6FKJ1R4jgNxREoNlAgSwLdNgc/s1000/football-jesus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF7nw6VMjHzAHrvm9aIetEOebBPkuFK3eNmnBTSdXlVIXEvUTexYyiFNAfFf2aes_cse_YIbr23shwGjHPj2T4j3dgdI2qDArxotCxAkqTdsU6FKJ1R4jgNxREoNlAgSwLdNgc/s320/football-jesus.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>The Ballad of Football Jesus</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I don’t care if it rains or freezes</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">‘Cos I got my Football Jesus</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Waitin’ on the sideline in the Hyde</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>In the Hy-ide, in the Hy-ide</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>Waitin’ on the sideline in the Hyde</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I ain’t scared of snow or hail</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Tulsk Lord Edward or Western Gael</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">With Football Jesus sittin’ by my side</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>By my si-ide, by my si-ide</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>With Football Jesus sittin’ by my side</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">He’ll jump for kickouts if they’re there</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">He’ll let her in quick to the edge of the square</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There’s nothing Football Jesus cannot do</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>Cannot do-ooo, cannot do-ooo</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>There’s nothing Football Jesus cannot do</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">He can’t be bought for a bag of silver</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Just give him the ball and he’ll deliver</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Football Jesus’s here for me and you</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>Me and you-oo, me and you-oo,</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>Football Jesus’s here for me and you</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><br /></div></div></div>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-66330949078365666372020-11-02T09:00:00.008+00:002020-11-02T09:00:07.974+00:00How Do You Solve a Problem like Varadkar?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5pjm7YJzEzOBvGqqdYWRPz53Rgi3dOeMvB09Bh0VAVfRk37FjBMP7LAxhlDlsvJyrCIEpiEcyXg4-M24qYN0JysFzuXD3BRkn3QMOQ9On4PB6YONQRzVCnXRZUQEPyd7MZo2I/s862/leo-varadkar-cb-live.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="566" data-original-width="862" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5pjm7YJzEzOBvGqqdYWRPz53Rgi3dOeMvB09Bh0VAVfRk37FjBMP7LAxhlDlsvJyrCIEpiEcyXg4-M24qYN0JysFzuXD3BRkn3QMOQ9On4PB6YONQRzVCnXRZUQEPyd7MZo2I/s320/leo-varadkar-cb-live.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Carefully parsing the media over the weekend – or such media as were <a href="https://twitter.com/rtetwip/status/1322854541801435136" target="_blank">arsed working</a> the weekend – one gets the feeling that An Tánaiste and the government are safe. An Tánaiste will have to say sorry to all the boys and girls in the class, but that will be the end of it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Your correspondent is not so sure. Besides; if the media had their way the story would never have broken in the first place. This story came from the clear blue sky – Village magazine is by no means mainstream – and it was not mentioned on RTÉ at all until different TDs started asking questions on Saturday afternoon. Once these genies escape their bottles it’s not easy know just how to get them back. So let’s examine the battlefield and do a little war-gaming, to pass the long winter’s day away.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Substantive Issue</h2><div>Did Leo Varadkar behave unethically in leaking confidential information to his buddy while Leo Varadkar was Taoiseach? Well, dur. Of course he did. If there were such things as ethics in Irish public life, he’d be gone already, and anybody who says any different is either too innocent for the world or else on the payroll.</div><div><br /></div><div>Consider recent resignations from public office. Why did Alan Shatter have to resign as Minister for Justice? Why did Enda Kenny have to resign as Taoiseach? Why did Frances Fitzgerald have to resign? What did they do wrong that went so far beyond the bounds that they had to go?</div><div><br /></div><div>The answer is: nothing. Each went because it was politically expedient to throw him or her under the bus. Shatter went to save the guards from being exposed as being up to some very funny business indeed (and the fact that nobody likes him). Enda went because Leo decided that his time had come, and he had enough people in Fine Gael to agree with him. Frances went for the same reason as Shatter. Nothing else.</div><div><br /></div><div>Therefore, the realpolitik of An Tánaiste’s position isn’t whether or not he behaved badly, because he certainly did, but is it politically expedient to make him pay? That is a matter of political judgement and political gamesmanship, and entirely in the hands of certain of the parties in the Dáil. Let’s look at them one-by-one.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Fianna Fáil</h2><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYK_2Ko77xAFOpc5U8ZFr0rJGdyJt5MWLXJqMzIRAbuClBw8pJYdHWoz-4v0hp9Ze6AcihM83aI5PvmQlO1OzHct9h7N9aYqYB9HU5OGU58a7j8wc0QliSUPGyEq9D3Aqeaskt/s405/micheal-martin.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="405" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYK_2Ko77xAFOpc5U8ZFr0rJGdyJt5MWLXJqMzIRAbuClBw8pJYdHWoz-4v0hp9Ze6AcihM83aI5PvmQlO1OzHct9h7N9aYqYB9HU5OGU58a7j8wc0QliSUPGyEq9D3Aqeaskt/w200-h200/micheal-martin.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>It is surely Micheál Martin’s dearest wish that An Tánaiste had managed to hit a higher bar than that achieved by former Minister for Agriculture Barry Cowen in attempting to weasel his way out of the mess. Sadly, he did not. The response from An Tánaiste on Saturday was watery in the extreme, and is worth nothing. There is no solace for Martin there. Therefore, he is hopeful for someone, somewhere, in the other parties to save him from having to make a potentially painful decision.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Fianna Fáil parliamentary party want Varadkar gone, not least because they hate his guts. There was some quite bullish tweeting from Deputies <a href="https://twitter.com/OCallaghanJim/status/1322526023410458626" target="_blank">O’Callaghan</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/MarcMacsharryTD/status/1322527450228817926" target="_blank">MacSharry</a> on Saturday, and from <a href="https://twitter.com/timmydooley/status/1322648415956815873" target="_blank">Senator Dooley</a>. However, every time the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party has been asked to stand up and be counted, they have run for the hills like spring lambs. It is difficult to believe this situation will be any different.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Green Party</h2><div><br /></div><div><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">I shouldn't laugh but.... <a href="https://t.co/Lejyb3k6pn">https://t.co/Lejyb3k6pn</a></p>— Neasa Hourigan TD (@neasa_neasa) <a href="https://twitter.com/neasa_neasa/status/1322643111030435841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 31, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>There exists a perpetual battle between the Green Party and the Labour Party to see who is the most virtuous of them all. This gets especially nasty when one or the other has taken the shilling and accepted a place in government. Each goes into government swearing that things will be different this time and each comes out battered and bruised, things having been exactly the same this time, actually.</div><div><br /></div><div>Does Deputy Ryan have the stones to do a Ruairí Quinn and demand a head? If he does and gets the head, Deputy Ryan doesn’t get any gyp from the bolshy wing of his party from now until Christmas. If Deputy Ryan asked for a head and doesn’t get it, he can go to the country on the Ethics ticket. If he behaves as Deputy Hourigan seems to suspect he will, then his own head will soon be in a basket, beyond all shadow of a doubt. There’s only so much tree huggers can live with before they reach for their hatchets.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Fine Gael</h2><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh99oHeDXE38qEQ-9Nhn4Lur_ro0r1OaKo8zyUyuNpVOkifC1_cnQn0SRfVm3GgJz9wen9TQtl7PR8KnEaEMwnooBpj9fD5y0327SIfZLcTaZEv-iwrDKBElDMk21yaE_HoNwaX/s560/simon-coveney.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="560" data-original-width="560" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh99oHeDXE38qEQ-9Nhn4Lur_ro0r1OaKo8zyUyuNpVOkifC1_cnQn0SRfVm3GgJz9wen9TQtl7PR8KnEaEMwnooBpj9fD5y0327SIfZLcTaZEv-iwrDKBElDMk21yaE_HoNwaX/w200-h200/simon-coveney.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>The most delicious dilemma of them all. The fundamental question is this: do Fine Gael want to fight an election on whether or not their leader was right to leak a confidential document to his buddy when that document was considerably to his buddy’s material benefit? If they are, then Leo is going nowhere and he will dare either Deputy Martin or Deputy Ryan to oppose him. If they so dare, Deputy Varadkar then pulls the plug, the government collapses and either the President asks the parties to see if they can form another government without an election, or we all head for the polls.</div><div><br /></div><div>Where this gets spicy is if there’s a majority of the Fine Gael party who do not want to fight an election on those terms. Pascal Donohue was on This Week on RTÉ Radio 1 defending An Tánaiste to the hilt, but of course Deputy Donohue was one of the first to back Leo for leader in the first place. There has been so statement at time of writing (Sunday night, about ten o’clock) from either Simon Coveney, Simon Harris or Helen McEntee, the contenders for the leadership should a vacancy arise. The longer there is no word from them, the more nervous Deputy Varadkar should get.</div><div><br /></div><div>If Fine Gael turn against Varadkar, Micheál Martin’s problem is solved. Deputy Varadkar is duly defenestrated, a new leader of Fine Gael is elected and the government survives until Christmas, probably. If they don’t, then there are decisions to make. And the decisions will of course be influenced by Sinn Féin and the Labour Party.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Labour Party</h2><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCkKCKGzdR1YcVRpQwJexGYkmRL4asWa3AC9FrIWvO6JT6oY-Bdx_avc5HXfO7CVY2xmxiMciu8hyphenhyphenVaG13Qwiday5CvXHw0vP3OBG_sfV0BFZ8MKoCNSvKUzYie_fH_dRnGri_/s409/alan-kelly.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="409" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCkKCKGzdR1YcVRpQwJexGYkmRL4asWa3AC9FrIWvO6JT6oY-Bdx_avc5HXfO7CVY2xmxiMciu8hyphenhyphenVaG13Qwiday5CvXHw0vP3OBG_sfV0BFZ8MKoCNSvKUzYie_fH_dRnGri_/w200-h200/alan-kelly.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>The Labour Party has the doubtful gift of sounding wonderful while in opposition. One imagines them parading through City Hall in their togas, such is the height of their rhetoric. They have been strangely silent so far on this issue, but Deputy Kelly has a combative personality. It’s hard to imagine him resisting going for a jugular.</div><div><br /></div><div>But it’s going to take more than the Labour Party rattling their sabres to get the government’s attention should they decide to dig foxholes and wait out the shelling, because the Labour Party is not what you’d call numerous. Neither is it likely to be a substantial player in the formation of the next government. Unlike Sinn Féin.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Sinn Féin</h2><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWKqJM4BtHGeawyDP7XWZ66IOfrc2uBmVOLmExDAjKs6W2fWOoryg9hatzrqXsAr-Ckwg9zsm3am7eE6V1SUnfvHASctbzwJgHnHo-xyLjC02jOeowvSj1Tuu_nNoYyittf7XY/s409/mary-lou-mcdonald.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="409" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWKqJM4BtHGeawyDP7XWZ66IOfrc2uBmVOLmExDAjKs6W2fWOoryg9hatzrqXsAr-Ckwg9zsm3am7eE6V1SUnfvHASctbzwJgHnHo-xyLjC02jOeowvSj1Tuu_nNoYyittf7XY/w200-h200/mary-lou-mcdonald.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Is this Leo Varadkar affair a Rubicon for Sinn Féin? The argument for them sitting dumb on this is their own tremendous need to show themselves as an acceptable party of government, a responsible party of government. Responsible parties don’t collapse governments in the middle of pandemics just because someone was a bit indiscrete with confidential secrets while Taoiseach, do they? One sees the bigger picture.</div><div><br /></div><div>However. Sinn Féin incredible result in the last election was because of a perception that Sinn Féin were not like the other parties. If they give Varadkar a pass on this, they are exactly like other parties – something that will be loudly noted by the entities further on Sinn Féin’s left, such as Deputies Murphy, Smyth and the rest. This is a nightmare for Sinn Féin. Deputies Murphy, Smyth and rest will never challenge Sinn Féin for a place in government but they can, and have, cost Sinn Féin seats that they can’t do without.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is interesting also to note that, ever since Dr Holohan returned to head up NPHET and his letter advocating a Level-5 lockdown was leaked, Sinn Féin have been notably less strident in their criticism of the government. Could it be that the party has echoed St Augustine and prayed “Lord, let us govern, but not yet?” </div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">The War Game</h2><div>As it is now, if I were Mary-Lou McDonald, I would table a motion of no confidence in the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Leo Varadkar and see who salutes. I can’t risk being outmanoeuvred on my left, and my luck will be out should this manoeuvring precipitate an election. But I cannot allow myself to be outmanoeuvred on my left, and this is a risk I must take if I am to win all.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most of the rest of the Opposition would support a motion of No Confidence in Leo, as they’re not likely to be all that fond of him either, and know a sacrifice will help keep the public calm. A Deputy McGrath or a Healy-Rae may go rogue, for divilment, but otherwise it’s the canny thing to do.</div><div><br /></div><div>This then passes the hand grenade back to Fine Gael. If Fine Gael decide they don’t want to face the country defending Leo, then out the window he goes and the crisis is over. Alternatively, if Fine Gael decide Leo is the boy for good or for ill, then the hand grenade becomes two hand grenades, one of which falls into Deputy Ryan’s lap, and the other into An Taoiseach’s.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the best case scenario, Both Deputies Martin and Ryan agree that Leo has got to go. It will make the election look more worthwhile, and may cause Fine Gael to recalibrate exactly how up for battle Fine Gael really are, realising the strength of Fianna Fáil and the Greens together is greater than the sum of their parts.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the worst case scenario, Deputies Martin and Ryan defend Varadkar because they are scared, and this will surely seal their doom. Ryan’s certainly, because the Greens have proved more restive since this most peculiar of governments was formed.</div><div><br /></div><div>If Martin could have Varadkar defenestrated it would be the best news he’s had in nine years, but again that is not in his control. That is entirely in the gift of Fine Gael, which paints a very vivid picture of just how far Fianna Fáil have fallen in ten years.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">TL;DR</h2><div>Somebody is losing a head over this. It’s just a question of who, and how many.</div>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-86616758964754763942020-10-28T21:42:00.000+00:002020-10-28T21:42:39.713+00:00The Working Man's Lament for the Pint of Stout<div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp_gcG62b-dreb0EXeCtuLyh2_l_3aLh25QmrRVPw43X4dciPBnGVcOtgt5K9A7UzfAT16Xm5YJVxD0BC6N0yvHNVaBKOfDniNyFdEPUZZVQX2rVcm0z1PJYo9UJ3eHtm2gehl/s1200/pint_settling.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp_gcG62b-dreb0EXeCtuLyh2_l_3aLh25QmrRVPw43X4dciPBnGVcOtgt5K9A7UzfAT16Xm5YJVxD0BC6N0yvHNVaBKOfDniNyFdEPUZZVQX2rVcm0z1PJYo9UJ3eHtm2gehl/w320-h213/pint_settling.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Joe Hill is one of the great folk/protest songs, and has been covered by the best folk/protest singers - <a href="https://youtu.be/0PoXM9NWGUM" target="_blank">Paul Robeson</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/l-JW4DKxwQM" target="_blank">Joan Baez</a>, and <a href="https://youtu.be/QNnKn3Q48Cs" target="_blank">Luke Kelly</a>. As such, you're correspondent has decided to lift the tune and disgrace it, in order to bewail my own utterly selfish wants (that may, nonetheless, be shared by a good big slice of the population). All together now, here we go:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />THE WORKING MAN'S LAMENT FOR THE PINT OF STOUT<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>I dreamed I heard a pint of stout<br />hissing from the cask<br />Says I but stout, it's level five<br />And I can't drink you through my mask<br />I can't drink you through my mask<br /><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>The pubs are closed, I said to stout<br />as the ghostly vision swayed<br />The only jars we see these days<br />Are full of marmalade<br />Are full of marmalade<br /><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>The Palace Bar, and Mulligan's,<br />and all the pubs in Dublin town<br />Where porter flowed like mountain springs<br />Today are all shut down<br />Today are all shut down<br /><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>I saw George Lee, on RTÉ,<br />Say we're locked down for the quarter<br />I damned his eyes, and cursed my fate,<br />and I dreamed once more of porter,<br />I dreamed once more of porter.</i></div>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-22117746992385366942020-10-12T09:00:00.012+01:002020-10-12T09:00:02.398+01:00Irish Political Culture Is Ill-Suited to the Times<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJs8c8jLozKEnFP_IpmEbspBYeWSWmUdMwDWzr1k1On_VQW3wt0lb3Ecvx1FdYorgys0QoHT9DU2Pv3UsrUnRuCCp1As3WJrJIcI-x6shzY5KZsHp3wVY0pmH1OqpGRjVjrQqX/s1180/leinster-house.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Leinster House" border="0" data-original-height="663" data-original-width="1180" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJs8c8jLozKEnFP_IpmEbspBYeWSWmUdMwDWzr1k1On_VQW3wt0lb3Ecvx1FdYorgys0QoHT9DU2Pv3UsrUnRuCCp1As3WJrJIcI-x6shzY5KZsHp3wVY0pmH1OqpGRjVjrQqX/w400-h225/leinster-house.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /> It would be nice if the state were to take stock and reset some dials when the pandemic finally runs its course. The state is nearly one hundred years old. The circumstances that prevailed in 1922 do not prevail now. This is a different Ireland, and it needs a different regulatory structure.<p></p><p>The Irish Free State was born from an armed revolution that led to civil war. The traces of that violent birth remain in our institutions. The first governments of the Free State were about consolidating that state against enemies, to borrow a phrase from the USA, both foreign and domestic. Therefore, the balance tilted more towards the institution than the citizen whenever the interests of the two competed.</p><p>The state is now as stable as a state can be. The IRA are gone. The state is protected by the European Super State that is currently being born, and that European Super State may be a better bet than China for replacing the USA as the greatest power in the world in a generation or two.</p><p>As such, we should now be in a position of sufficient maturity to loosen some of the over-tight bonds, and in a position of sufficient wisdom born from experience, between the financial crash and the pandemic, to see the need for loosening those bonds.</p><p>Consider the case of judging the judges. Ireland’s laws regarding freedom of speech are highly restrictive. This restriction acts as a halter on the media’s ability to tell stories fully, which in turn comforts the strong and afflicts the weak.</p><p>We’ve seen it in the past fortnight concerning Golfgate and Mr Justice Wolfe. The current issue of <a href="https://www.thephoenix.ie/article/quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes/">The Phoenix </a>details the twenty-year struggle to have a judicial council appointed, a twenty-year struggle that has yet to leave the starting gate. Not good enough. This needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency.</p><p>Judicial accountability is just one of a number of major areas of Irish public life that are not scrutinised. The property market and the meat-factory industry are two obvious cases. The communal living scheme is eerily reminiscent of the boom in building two-bedroom apartments with parking for one car of the early 2000s. The two-bedroom apartment is the most profitable type of building for a developer. It is the least useful for families looking for homes. Are we going to make the same mistakes again? If not, what’s going to stop us?</p><p>As for the meat factories, the special treatment given to the cause of keeping schools open during the pandemic is certainly understandable, if perhaps not entirely wise. The special treatment afforded the meat factories makes no sense whatsoever. The special treatment is so odd that it resulted in Michael McDowell and Sinn Féin being on the same side of the argument, not something that occurs very often. What’s going on, and why is it going on? A deafening silence from Institutional Ireland.</p><p>One of the flaws in Irish political culture is the culture’s emphasis on politics and lack of emphasis on governance. As a people, we revel in stories about strokes and politicians slipping blades between each other’s ribs. Governance – whether the bins should be collected at the start or the end of a week; how best to distribute services, by geography or population; how best to distribute taxes; how best to educate children; how to deal with the left-behind – all these questions bore us rigid. Ireland expects somebody else to worry about that stuff. The part of democracy that demands the sovereign people take responsibility for these decisions is a penny that has yet to drop with the Irish nation.</p><p>Perhaps it will drop now. One of the effects of the pandemic is that the nation’s indifference to the spectacular levels of public-service waste is coming home to roost. Why does Ireland lack acute bed capacity? Because acute bed capacity has never been an issue in Irish politics. Every party throws money at the HSE and hopes a miracle will result. They are incapable of doing anything else. Utterly out of their depth.</p><p>When Norma Foley announced the balls-up in the Leaving Cert results, who was really surprised? We might not have said it aloud, but nobody really expected that automated system to work. The government got away with it by giving everyone whatever course they wanted. If that has negative consequences, they’ll happen on someone else’s watch, a double-result on any Irish politician’s scorecard.</p><p>The most important thing to take from all of this is that it’s not the politician’s fault. It’s out fault for electing them. These are not colonial governors sent from London. These are ourselves, doing things as we, the sovereign people, would have them done.</p><p>Therefore, the onus is on the people to change their taste in politics. Politics has to become boring, an accountants’ game of what did you say you’d do, what did you do, how much did it cost, why did it happen, why didn’t it happen and how much did it all cost? The electoral system will have to change too, as it’s inclined to prioritise local over national needs. This will reduce the fun of election counts, but reader, look on the bright side. Maybe you’ll be able to go for a pint again. Wouldn’t that be worth it?</p>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-8175664439252342092020-09-28T09:00:00.023+01:002020-09-28T09:00:05.861+01:00In Opposition to Suicide, Assisted or Otherwise<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrYmOYrqVFLxVOf5da73juf3sqfK8EGIsO6UXwqmvlH5Z6r4UDEwEP9ZmTnXsDbY-H_dozLgb7oh_-cTxMe-aOlNdEL7fRXLtA23VYhBOGvG1ZDTbwg7RBzxkIqFnf1xoKEQoI/s620/gino-kenny-elected.jpg" imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="330" data-original-width="620" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrYmOYrqVFLxVOf5da73juf3sqfK8EGIsO6UXwqmvlH5Z6r4UDEwEP9ZmTnXsDbY-H_dozLgb7oh_-cTxMe-aOlNdEL7fRXLtA23VYhBOGvG1ZDTbwg7RBzxkIqFnf1xoKEQoI/w400-h213/gino-kenny-elected.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Deputy Gino Kenny<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>Deputy Gino Kenny’s <a href="https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/bill/2020/24/eng/initiated/b2420d.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Dying with Dignity</a> Bill is due to go before the Dáil this week. It should be opposed for two reasons – the floodgate effect, and what such a bill says about the very nature of life itself.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Floodgate Effect</h2><p>Most conservative objections to liberal social legislation are based on floodgate effects. This is because all legislation has a floodgate effect. If it didn’t, what would be the point of it?</p><p>The Dying with Dignity Bill contains a number of provisions to limit this floodgate effect. A “qualifying person” must be diagnosed as suffering from a terminal disease with no hope of a cure by two separate medical professionals. There must be a treatment paper trail. A qualifying person must be judged mentally capable of making the decision to die. There will be provision made for conscientious objection by medical professionals. And so on.</p><p>Immense cultural taboos towards taking life before its natural end currently exist. For all the horrors of death – and they are many – very few people step forward to put a pillow on the face of the dying and hurry things along.</p><p>We all tell each other how we’ll eat a bullet before suffering the indignity of being a bedridden, senile incontinent in a nursing home. Everyone nods their head when that comes up in discussion. And yet the western world has this year shut itself down to protect the lives, among others, of those same bedridden, senile incontinents. Isn’t there a certain inconsistency in that? Are we really sure we know what we’re doing here?</p><p>If this bill, or a bill like it, were passed and a similar pandemic were to arrive a generation or two later, there wouldn’t be any debate at all about what to do with the nursing homes. Once the taboo is broken and the years go by, the constraints are lifted, one by one, because their original impulse, the deep-seated taboo, no long exists.</p><p>Succeeding generations will be puzzled to know what all these obstacles are doing in what should have been perfectly straight-forward legislation. Look at this ridiculous two-doctor rule. If I need a tooth pulled, I don’t know two dentists to tell me, do I? What about the qualified person being in full awareness of the decision? For goodness sake, surely if you’ve lost your marbles, you’re more or less dead already, aren’t you? What were these people thinking in 2020?</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Fundamental Irrationality of Life</h2><p>The current age – which has been the current age since Pierre Beaumarchais staged the Marriage of Figaro at the Comédie-Française in Paris in 1778, for what that’s worth – sees itself as the age of science. There are no ghosts in the machine. There is, and there ain’t. With apologies to Wittgenstein, what is, is, and what ain’t, ain’t. It is unfortunate to take so unsubtle a position with regard to so messy a proposition as life, and society, and humanity. It can lead down strange paths.</p><p>Some of the great scientific minds of the first half of the Twentieth Century were eugenicists. Two of the founding fathers of modern statistics, Sir Francis Galton and Sir Ronald Fisher, were eugenicists. They had read their Darwin (Galton and Darwin were related) and done their sums. What was the point in human progress being held back by, to borrow a phrase from a movie, too many goofy bastards in the herd?</p><p>The eugenics movement never recovered from the Allies’ entry into the Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 6th, 1945. It’s one thing to talk about eugenics and tidying up the race while enjoying a glass of port after a five-course dinner. It’s quite another to see that race-tidying process industrialised as the Germans, that nation of engineers, had done.</p><p>Science favours controlled breeding. How could it not? There are no rational arguments against it. Only the sentimental. And yet it is sentiment that makes us human in the first place, is it not? Just how rational is the human animal anyway?</p><p>Our only certainty in life is death. Whoever you are, where-ever you are, whether you are a man or a woman, rich or poor, tall or short, you will die. It’s only a question of when.</p><p>What, then, is the point of living? What is the point in knowing that all you have will be left behind you, in knowing that every day brings the end closer, that every day after your peak you have declined by that little bit more, until that poor bastard in the nursing home wearing the diaper is your own sweet self? The very act of living exists in defiance of rationality itself.</p><p>It’s the easiest thing in the world to get dead. People die all the time. They’re here, and then they’re not, and they are never coming back, ever, not even for a glimpse on the side of a hill in the distance. Gone.</p><p>And yet, for reasons that are not rational, that do not balance on both sides of the equation, people fight for life with tooth and claw. All the damned in the war zones of the world, in Yemen, in Syria, in South Sudan – why do they cling to life as they do? Where is the kindness in allowing them to suffer so when their end is inevitable? Wouldn’t it be kinder for the West to come along and assist them into the Undiscovered Country?</p><p>Cultural taboos are to the social sciences what Schrödinger's cat is to physics. All very explicable in theory but when you go looking for the actual thing itself it proves very damned hard to pin down. Physicists have been searching for that damn cat for ninety-five years, and have yet to find a single whisker. We change what we do not understand at our absolute peril.</p><p>FOCAL SCOIR. Some people do not need assistance to commit suicide. Some people are every day aware that the means of their escape is in their own hands. The big thing to remember here, and the point I think that’s being missed by this bill, is that suicide only looks like an escape. It’s not really. An exit door is only ever an exit door. It’s always better to stay in the ring, because it can’t rain every day. It just can’t. If life is hanging heavy with you these days, it’s no harm to give the Samaritans (https://www.samaritans.org/ireland/samaritans-ireland/) a shout. You can call them at 116 123 twenty-four hours a day, whenever suits. They’d love to hear from you.</p>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-28290072751824163172020-06-22T09:00:00.016+01:002020-06-22T09:00:07.326+01:00The World Will Not End if the Greens Vote No<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrqrOK2RixKzqyh0IT_6HsZJ2Eg_UTh93PDjNs04bb9fgx7-IEvvR7xLNE4Dwr0TgPPI1TqqgbWP_N4BRaxRWsmfGaz6aaVOQgee2o-KUR3C0wH5Ut2kMvEh_mp_7FvPb7uT6N/s738/green-party-decision.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="738" data-original-width="732" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrqrOK2RixKzqyh0IT_6HsZJ2Eg_UTh93PDjNs04bb9fgx7-IEvvR7xLNE4Dwr0TgPPI1TqqgbWP_N4BRaxRWsmfGaz6aaVOQgee2o-KUR3C0wH5Ut2kMvEh_mp_7FvPb7uT6N/w396-h400/green-party-decision.png" width="396" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>It would be an exaggeration to describe the current state of Irish politics as being like three-dimensional chess. However, there can be no doubt that acey-deucey it ain’t. There are many balls in the air at the moment, and how they fall, and in what order, will determine what happens next.</div><div><br /></div><div>This isn’t a fault in the system. If anything, it’s a good thing. It means that our politics is transitioning from the civil war structure that’s existed since the foundation of the state to whatever exactly it is that’s going to replace it. And while all this is going on, a government still has to be formed, taxes have levied, bills have to be passed, debts have to be paid – all the everyday housekeeping of politics.</div><div><br /></div><div>Right now the formation of the next government hinges on the thoughts of the two-and-a-half to three thousand members of the Green Party, north and south of the border. The current dynamics within the Green Party are fascinating and complex, as outlined in the diagram.</div><div><br /></div><div>Are the Greens an environment first, socially progressive second party, or a socially progressive first, environmental second party? Are they more pressure group than political party? What are we to made of the people who negotiated the deal voting against it, or the remarkable intervention of the Northern Green leader, Claire Bailey, MLA, yesterday?</div><div><br /></div><div>Each of those alone is worth a solid thousand words. But the particular point of interest this morning is: what happens if the membership shoot the deal down on Friday? What then?</div><div><br /></div><div>On the face of it, the Greens are conducting a remarkable experiment in popular democracy, and are being thanked very little for it. The Greens’ membership ballot on the program for government is utterly orthogonal to Irish political history and tradition.</div><div><br /></div><div>Micheál Martin made a big deal of listening to grass roots when he became leader of Fianna Fáil, and has made a point of ignoring them in the nine years since. Fine Gael, bless them, never even bothered to pretend. The party that likes to tell the country what’s good for it also likes to tell its own members what’s good for them.</div><div><br /></div><div>The question for the Greens is if this popular democracy renders the party incapable of practical action. In a nice piece of modularity, this is the Greens’ political dilemma too – does their commitment to Green issues mean that just can’t function in a country where people travel by car and burn turf and raise cattle?</div><div><br /></div><div>If the Greens were a normal political party, the anti-deal positions of Claire Bailey and Francis Noel Duffy and Neasa Hourigan and the rest would be just so much theatre, like Ringer fulminating over Fianna Fáil perfidy at the Fine Gael Ard Fheis. These being the Greens though, they might put their money where their mouths are, and the system isn’t built for shocks like that.</div><div><br /></div><div>Pat Leahy wrote a remarkable <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/greens-next-move-will-have-a-long-lasting-effect-on-irish-politics-1.4283546">column in the Irish Times on Saturday</a>, outlining the land of milk and honey that awaits the Greens if they pass the deal, and the barren and empty wastes that await them should they be so foolish as to refuse to eat their sprouts.</div><div><br /></div><div>Coincidentally, this analysis is also the analysis of the Fine Gael party, who would see the Green’s failure to pass the deal as proof that all avenues have been exhausted, leaving An Taoiseach no option but to call another election.</div><div><br /></div><div>Francis Noel Duffy told Gavan Reilly on Reilly’s <a href="https://www.newstalk.com/shows/record-gavan-reilly-834270">On the Record radio show</a> that he doesn’t see a second election as being inevitable at all. There are other combinations of parties available, many of which did better at the polls than either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, and are more ideologically suited to Green issues than Fine Gael in particular. If this deal is voted down, perhaps the President would ask the leaders of those parties to see if they could somehow form a government before admitting defeat and returning to the people?</div><div><br /></div><div>One of Leahy’s pro-deal arguments is that if a second election were held, the Greens would be mashed by Sinn Féin. It’s not clear why this would be the case. Their bases are different and, while Fine Gael would damn the Greens as putting squirrels before people, the Greens can counter that if a party doesn’t have principles it has nothing. That’s an argument with a strong appeal. Also, the Greens would go into the election with a higher profile than they had in February and in a position to get some of that huge left-wing vote that went to Sinn Féin last time out, to say nothing of the Fianna Fáil carcass from which all parties and none will feast.</div><div><br /></div><div>In point of fact, the Greens and Sinn Féin could form a transfer pact for a second election - "you voted for a left-wing government, but they wouldn’t let you have one. Vote for us now, and you won’t be denied this time. Transfer Left!" Pigeons, meet cat.</div><div><br /></div><div>Your correspondent is not a member of the Green Party and has no vote on the program for government. However, If I did have a vote, I would vote against the deal. Not because I don’t think it’s green enough or because it doesn’t tick enough social justice boxes; the uncosted program for government is built on sand anyway, and what’s in it won’t matter a damn once the recession hits.</div><div><br /></div><div>I would vote no because I don’t care for being threatened with terrible and immediate war should I vote in a way that doesn’t suit some people. Bullies have to be stood up to where-ever they are met.</div><div><br /></div><div>The world will not end if the Greens vote no; it won’t be like a new Covid strain sweeping in from the East, or a no-deal Brexit, or a foot-and-mouth outbreak, or famine or penal laws or the return of Cromwell. It’ll be just a question of politicians sitting around a table and cutting another deal, like politicians are meant to do. Roll on Judgement Day.</div>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-63398950613678149002020-06-08T09:00:00.015+01:002020-06-08T09:00:07.133+01:00On Trust in the Media<div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKpPKuxVZx6NadDSbw5RC0hvfMdOt4oo6qMzixxgzji6aHtVclkaoFKIYsF7egJ9zlyU_H2EJL8gI-7d-tyPaooUzhFWoyV9cKEYE4_vSkH8ba36qjEneRE9phW4B9ByiieyVf/s979/rte-sarah-mcinerney.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="543" data-original-width="979" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKpPKuxVZx6NadDSbw5RC0hvfMdOt4oo6qMzixxgzji6aHtVclkaoFKIYsF7egJ9zlyU_H2EJL8gI-7d-tyPaooUzhFWoyV9cKEYE4_vSkH8ba36qjEneRE9phW4B9ByiieyVf/s320/rte-sarah-mcinerney.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Sarah McInerney, talented columnist and rising RTÉ star, uncharacteristically missed an open goal in her column in yesterday’s <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ireland/sarah-mcinerney-forgotten-people-fired-up-by-out-of-touch-press-w0sn5nxbr">Sunday Times</a>. “Forgotten people fired up by out-of-touch press” was the headline on the column, and it seemed that McInerney was about to do what the Irish media are generally loathe to do, which is turn the spotlight on themselves.</div>
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Ireland is a very small country and, in a small field like journalism, you have to be careful about whose toes you tread on. This was always true, but it’s especially true now, as the media struggles for existence in the face of the all-conquering World Wide Web.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
McInerney’s piece opens by remarking on US riot police shooting at journalists and then draws closer to home by writing of former journalist Boris Johnson’s disdain for a free press in what was once Great Britain. She wrote of the current President of the United States’s often-repeated assertion that the press is out of touch, and went on to examine if that is true in the Irish context. And here, sadly, Aughrim was lost.</div>
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<br /></div>
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McInerney cites two examples of the Irish media being out of touch. The first is the public anger at water charges bubbling over in 2014, which McInerney writes was not covered by the media because they were unaware of it, and the second is a list of influential Irish media people on Twitter that was published last week, of which McInerney notes 75% are white men.</div>
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Water charges. A Google Trends search for “water charges” in Ireland, from 2004 to yesterday, can be broken down geographically. This is what it looks like.</div>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/trends_nrtr/2213_RC01/embed_loader.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> trends.embed.renderExploreWidget("GEO_MAP_0", {"comparisonItem":[{"keyword":"water charges","geo":"IE","time":"2004-01-01 2020-06-07"},{"keyword":"bailout","geo":"IE","time":"2004-01-01 2020-06-07"},{"keyword":"rugby","geo":"IE","time":"2004-01-01 2020-06-07"}],"category":0,"property":""}, {"exploreQuery":"date=all&geo=IE&q=water%20charges,bailout,rugby","guestPath":"https://trends.google.com:443/trends/embed/"}); </script>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So we can see that water charges were very dear to the hearts of people in Lucan, Dublin, Limerick and Cork. The rest of country - meh.</div>
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By means of geographical comparison, we can do a search for “rugby”.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/trends_nrtr/2213_RC01/embed_loader.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> trends.embed.renderExploreWidget("GEO_MAP_2", {"comparisonItem":[{"keyword":"water charges","geo":"IE","time":"2004-01-01 2020-06-07"},{"keyword":"bailout","geo":"IE","time":"2004-01-01 2020-06-07"},{"keyword":"rugby","geo":"IE","time":"2004-01-01 2020-06-07"}],"category":0,"property":""}, {"exploreQuery":"date=all&geo=IE&q=water%20charges,bailout,rugby","guestPath":"https://trends.google.com:443/trends/embed/"}); </script>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Everybody in Ireland is interested in rugby, and this interest peaks every four years, in keeping with the cycles of the Rugby World Cup. The rugby team gets the nation’s attention.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
And finally, again for comparison, a search for hurling:</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/trends_nrtr/2213_RC01/embed_loader.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> trends.embed.renderExploreWidget("GEO_MAP_3", {"comparisonItem":[{"keyword":"water charges","geo":"IE","time":"2004-01-01 2020-06-07"},{"keyword":"bailout","geo":"IE","time":"2004-01-01 2020-06-07"},{"keyword":"rugby","geo":"IE","time":"2004-01-01 2020-06-07"},{"keyword":"hurling","geo":"IE","time":"2004-01-01 2020-06-07"}],"category":0,"property":""}, {"exploreQuery":"date=all&geo=IE&q=water%20charges,bailout,rugby,hurling","guestPath":"https://trends.google.com:443/trends/embed/"}); </script>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The hurling search is interesting for the absence of Dublin in first place. First place in the hurling searches is Thurles, County Tipperary. Dublin, despite its demographic advantage, is back in the chasing pack.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The point of all this is: water charges have been a huge issue in Lucan since Joe Higgins was elected in 1997, and a big issue in Dublin over the same time. Outside of those areas, nobody gives a toss about water charges.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Therefore, in identifying water charges as a hidden issue for the Irish nation, McInerney herself commits the sin she is here to condemn – not knowing the concerns of the people.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
The influential journalist list is a bottle of smoke. It’s a good idea with any survey of this kind to consider how the runners and riders are scored. What is the fundamental unit of influence? If distance is measured in metres and volume in litres, what is influence measured in? The gasbag, perhaps? Does this gasbag unit increase in a linear, logarithmic, or exponential fashion? A brief glance at that influencer lists suggests this list was very useful in gaining its publisher publicity, and in no way otherwise was it of any merit. So that’s two swings, two misses for McInerney.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In his <a href="https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/money/a20703846/tom-wolfe-new-jounalism-american-novel-essay/">famous essay about the New Journalism</a>, Tom Wolfe wrote often about the need for journalists to leave the newsroom and go out and meet actual people, to ask them about their lives and then return and type it all up. To what extent does the Irish media do that? To what extent do the journalists pound the streets and listen to the people?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
For instance: it is a truism in Irish politics that blow-ins do not, and can not, get elected. What, then made the good people of Clare give Violet Anne Wynne 8,987 first-preference votes and a seat in Dáil Éireann?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
For another instance: the heartbroken Kate O’Connell was a guest on Brendan O’Connor’s radio show after losing her seat in the election in February. O’Connell spoke of the reception she got on the doors during the campaign. It was terrible, she said. Nobody was interested in what Fine Gael had to say; as far as the honest burghers of Dublin Bay South were concerned, things could not get worse.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now. If Dublin Bay South isn’t the most affluent constituency in Ireland it’s certainly worthy of a podium finish. And yet its electorate seem to think they’re in Stalingrad in 1943, eating their boots and waiting on the German bombs. Why? How could so affluent, so advantaged, so privileged an electorate think that? How are they so distanced from reality? And don’t tell me about Ringsend being in the constituency – Kate O’Connell no more visited Ringsend during the campaign than she visited Mars, the red planet.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
For a third instance: one gets elected in Ireland by going on the stump. The personal touch. People like to see "himself". Funeral attendances win votes. How, then, could Patricia Ryan win 10,155 votes in Kildare South having gone on her holidays during the actual campaign? Feeding five thousand with two loaves and five fishes is run of the mill compared to this achievement. How did it happen?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
If we are to have a native media, reporting and chronicling news and events relevant to Ireland, seen from an Irish perspective, these are the issues that should – that must – be reported on. That they’re not being reported on suggests an extraordinary systems-failure in the media itself, one that one billion tweets urging the little people to #buyapaper is unlikely to turn around.</div>
An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-87833446614599022262020-06-02T09:00:00.006+01:002020-06-02T09:00:06.910+01:00On the Matter of Government Formation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilxxsi0gfJwasoAffq3d-crNt6poa2acKUrc_01XO1HmxUcjPzszajBXwm8mU5bqJzPRIown1VXhbx42tJBaNPtGu9eZ1hczYyrCdAKzwU8SKAS3rHN2uUWwqtwwdshaQPdcHB/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="874" data-original-width="1340" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilxxsi0gfJwasoAffq3d-crNt6poa2acKUrc_01XO1HmxUcjPzszajBXwm8mU5bqJzPRIown1VXhbx42tJBaNPtGu9eZ1hczYyrCdAKzwU8SKAS3rHN2uUWwqtwwdshaQPdcHB/w400-h261/eamon-ryan-catherine-martin-green-party.jpg" title=""That head ... do you know, I've a stick at home that'd suit it just lovely..."" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Deputy Micheál Martin told Ryan Tubridy on the Late Late Show of May 22nd that he expected the government to finally be formed by the end of this week. Not for the first time, the unhappy Deputy Martin appears to have missed the mark. The government is no nearer to being formed now than it was the day after the election, and the thoughtful citizen could do worse than to ponder why that may be.</div><div><br /></div><div>The election will be 118 days in the past come Friday. Covid-19 or no, it’s ridiculous to suggest that all this time is being spent in negotiations to a common end. That process doesn’t take one hundred days. We do not know what is going on in those once smoke-filled rooms, and the political correspondents seem far too polite to ask, but negotiations are not going on. They cannot be going on if they’re taking over one hundred days to happen.</div><div><br /></div><div>Your correspondent relies on the Irish Times, the Sunday Times, the Irish Examiner and The Phoenix magazine for his information. Close reading of all of the above suggests that the 33rd Dáil will never elect a Taoiseach; that the acting Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, will ask the President for a dissolution of this Dáil and another general election; and that all this will happen before the summer recess, rather than after.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Phoenix has been forthright in its contention that Fine Gael are only interested in stringing out the talks. This certainly makes sense from Fine Gael’s point of view. Having first wanted to retire to their country homes with their football clutched tightly under their arm, the party now feels that the country finally understands how lucky it is to have them, and will be grateful to them over how steadily they have steered the ship of state through these terrible pandemic waters.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fianna Fáil, the party that dominated politics in the state from 1932 to 2011, are dead, gone, kaput, over. If there were any sign of life in the party, Deputy Martin would have been defenestrated months ago. Fianna Fáil cannot face into another election with Micheál Martin’s face on the poster, and it looks like that’s exactly what they’re going to do. The soldiers of destiny are marching towards the Somme and oblivion.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which brings us to the third hand in the reel, the Greens. Their has been general dismay among the commentariat over the Greens’ decision to heave their leader during these times of talks. It’s actually the best thing the Greens have already done and, like Napoleon’s victory at Marengo, it’s also the heralding of a new force to be reckoned with.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Senior hurling” is the phrase most associated with the Green Party in terms of national politics, as in the Greens not being ready for senior hurling. The Greens are ready for it now, or at least, their leader-elect, Deputy Catherine Martin, is.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fianna Fáil can look to Deputy Martin and weep. Martin, from the so-called Fianna Fáil gene pool, is doing what nobody in Fianna Fáil has either the talent, the will or the guts to do. She’s going to the back field with Old Shep, a shotgun, and a spade, and knows she’ll be coming back with only two of them.</div><div>Eamon Ryan, like Micheál Martin, is a dead man walking. It is impossible to conceive that Catherine Martin has not counted heads before allowing this happen, and there is no hope for Eamon Ryan. The future is already here.</div><div><br /></div><div>Part of the shock among the commentariat seems to be over the fact that Eamon Ryan, like the Baroness in The Sound of Music, is getting the chop without ever having done anything wrong. Welcome to senior hurling, Deputy Ryan. Deserve has nothing to do with it. Gratitude has nothing to do with it. It’s all about want, want, want, and right now nobody wants it more than Catherine Martin.</div><div><br /></div><div>The <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/bickering-wears-down-patience-as-government-talks-crawl-forwards-1.4266008">Irish Times</a> ran a story on Saturday quoting anonymous sources on their impressions of the various participants in the talks. There was a description of Catherine Martin that is particularly worth noting. While Deputy Niamh Hourigan is voluble on the Greens’ different causes, Deputy Martin, according to the source, “sits there like a Sphinx.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Have you been in many meetings, Reader? Trust your correspondent on this one; it’s the person who isn’t talking in the meeting that’s holding all the aces. Some lemon in the Green Party – they haven’t gone away, you know – disputed this characterisation of Martin as unfair. Reader, it was the height of praise.</div><div><br /></div><div>So there we have the participants at the talks. Fine Gael, biding their time; Fianna Fáil, playing Weekend at Bernie’s, and the Greens, playing the long game. That dynamic would struggle to organise a bus to Leopardstown for an evening’s racing – if there were any racing, dammit. There’s no way it’s forming a government.</div><div><br /></div><div>So the talks will break down, as they must. The Greens will go to the country under Catherine Martin, as Eamon Ryan may do a Sidney Dalton and go before he’s pushed. The Greens’ vote will improve under its marvellously-gifted new leader, with both the parties’ cores – the Range-Rover drivers of South Dublin, the donkey aters of the wild Atlantic way – both seeing themselves reflected in the new leader, and all parties and none outside those cores recognising in Martin someone with whom they can do business.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sinn Féin will again make hay on their populist platform, a platform that Micheál Martin could have destroyed by simply talking to them, but whose effective ostracisation will simply have glamorised Sinn Féin further. Candidate selection will be the big challenge for Sinn Féin – getting enough to stand in the first place, and maybe sidelining a few of those loose cannons the last election turned up. If anybody should know how to bury a loose cannon, the Shinners should.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Greens and Shinners will both feast on the FF carcass, and maybe Fine Gael will pick up a few seats as well. It’s possible the next government will be a Green / Sinn Féin coalition, with the Greens acting as a check on the hammer of Deputy Ó Broin and the sickle of Deputy O’Reilly.</div><div><br /></div><div>It’s possible that the shocking nature of that new government, the first 21st-Century government of Ireland in its way, may be able to make the radical reforms the country needs. It’s possible, but not likely. The inertia of the vested interests will be too strong. The IMF will be back; it’s only a question of when. The hope here is that Irish politics will have matured sufficiently when the IMF do return to realise that electing the other civil war party is not real reform and the only way to judge a government is on how well it balances its books. It would be a shame to waste yet another crisis.</div>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-53551105402982597352020-04-20T09:00:00.000+01:002020-04-20T09:00:10.189+01:00Normal People is a Rotten Novel<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVJxRK6HpkbCoUFY_DNg3VAKVcIfPA-bhGvOGw47_y1t44GmG-pkh05SMcET67MH1tgrfzkjYdRStWA1pNBssGTnIrkMvt8cHKUBnjTRyQa8ZCUihkCcRpAovm3DuFcC461h0q/s1600/normal-people-tv.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1000" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVJxRK6HpkbCoUFY_DNg3VAKVcIfPA-bhGvOGw47_y1t44GmG-pkh05SMcET67MH1tgrfzkjYdRStWA1pNBssGTnIrkMvt8cHKUBnjTRyQa8ZCUihkCcRpAovm3DuFcC461h0q/s400/normal-people-tv.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Some "</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 12.8px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">normal people</span><i>", apparently.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The TV adaptation of Normal People, the phenomenally successful
second novel by Irish author Sally Rooney, runs to twelve episodes.
This is the latest news to stagger your faithful correspondent, for
whom the success of Normal People exists at a similar level of
bafflement as the placement of the figs in the fig rolls.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Normal-People-Sally-Rooney-ebook/dp/B07DVT2VZK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2XY4W4RRW9Z5R&dchild=1&keywords=normal+people+sally+rooney&qid=1587217834&sprefix=normal+people%2Caps%2C146&sr=8-1">Normal People</a> is a
superficial, shallow, vain, vacuous, mutton-headed book about the
first-world problems of a poor little rich girl. The characterisation
would bring a blush to cardboard, the human insight is blind, the
subtly is that of a cavity block and, if Sally Rooney’s really is
the voice of a generation, that generation is an unusually stupid
one.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Novels are written
in three broad styles. These aren’t hard and fast guidelines, of
course, more like familial resemblances than any scientifically
rigorous classification, but useful for aiding our understanding and
comparing our experiences.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The first family is
the traditional story. There is a protagonist who does things, and
these things are described in the course of the book. These books are
generally set in a world that is real and recognisable. Emile Zola is
typicalof this school. He thought it the novelist’s duty to go out
in the world, and then report on what he or she saw there.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The second style is
the window-on-the-soul school, of which Henry James may be considered
the trailblazer. Acolytes consider such things as plots and story
arcs passé and, for some reason, particularly prize the composition
of the sentences in a novel, which are, ideally, exquisite. Colm
Tóibín would be a leading member of this school.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The third style is
avant garde, where the writer writes utter gibberish that can be
understood by neither man nor beast, but we all pretend that they’re
capital-P-Profound because we don’t want to look thick. Thomas
Pynchon is the pope of this church, and Gravity’s Rainbow its
sacred text.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
To which school does
Sally Rooney belong? Well. That’s hard to say.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Normal People is set
in contemporary Ireland, rural Sligo and Dublin. Neither place is
recognisable in the novel. A quick example: early in the book, the
hero, Connell, is having an argument with his mother, Lorraine.
Lorraine is so annoyed with Connell that she tells him to stop the
car, she’s going to get out and get the bus home.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It is to be hoped
that Lorraine packed a lunch, because she could be waiting a long
time on that bus if she’s living in a small town in Sligo. I’m
not sure how many rural Irish towns have public transport, but if
there were any such towns in Sligo I feel I would have heard.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The book is full of
these chasms in reality. Marianne, the book’s heroine, goes from
social isolation at school to being the It-Girl amongst the freshers
in college. That doesn’t happen. It takes time to learn social
skills. You can’t just put them on like a hat.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Connell is from a
working class background. He also has his own car and can afford to
go back-packing in Italy while in college. Who pays that bill?
Connell is embarrassed to tell his mother that he voted for Declan
Bree, the venerable Sligo socialist. Lorraine voted for Bree as well
– she’s a big fan, and has educated Connell about “Cuba and the
cause of Palestinian liberation.” Why would Connell be embarrassed
to agree with his mother? It doesn’t make any sense. Connell is
appalled when a female teacher makes an advance on him in a
nightclub. Come on, now. On what planet does that happen?</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Only one part of
Normal People feels real, and that’s in Italy, where Marianne is
entertaining her college set and the back-packing Connell in her
father’s villa. Marianne’s horrible college boyfriend Jamie – a
pantomime villan, if ever there were one – gets snotty when the
champagne is not served in flute glasses. Marianne points out that
these are champagne coupes, *actually*, but the damage is done. We’re
drinking out of gravy boats, sneers Jamie, and he means it to sting.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
That part reads like
an eye-witness account. That exchange was only part of the novel in
which your correspondent was able to believe could have happened. The
rest is narcissistic, pseudo-intellectual rubbish and how in God’s
holy name the makers of the TV show have got twelve episodes out of
it is baffling.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
They’ve either
stuffed it like a sausage with whatever offcuts or offal or dog or
cat they could lay hands on, or else they’ve stretched it out, like
someone buttering the bread for the harvest festival in the
Presbyterian Hall. James Marriott <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-normal-people-by-sally-rooney-will-they-wont-they-pair-up-2srntjwgv">wrote in The Times</a> that he
“finished the book determined to look at the world differently. I’m
not sure what higher compliment you can pay a novel.” Sooner you than me, hoss.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
FOCAL SCOIR: The New
York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/arts/television/normal-people-hulu.html">previewed the TV show</a> last week as “a rare TV show about teenagers that respects
intimacy as a powerful storytelling tool, both on and off camera,”
and praised the show for hiring an “intimacy co-ordinator.” Thank
goodness the intimacy co-ordinator never went to so far as to suggest
that the actress who portrays Marianne keep her clothes on. Nobody
would have known where to look.</div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-1900610706718198982020-04-14T09:00:00.000+01:002020-04-14T09:00:01.014+01:00Half-a-Million Voters Have the Right to be Represented<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUs-E3KRNXo6H6F63kW_p14_Wcq4aIaCQyw_TbXJORH0goMRSPwSBI0KmxZrzqP4BTnnRlw1bnOPzNPo2IBRxy2lzMdZRnPOmeEVcNDImzrpnFIqWDpEv_cW9d9jNxzUmzW04l/s1600/sinn-fein-thomas-gould-cork.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1066" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUs-E3KRNXo6H6F63kW_p14_Wcq4aIaCQyw_TbXJORH0goMRSPwSBI0KmxZrzqP4BTnnRlw1bnOPzNPo2IBRxy2lzMdZRnPOmeEVcNDImzrpnFIqWDpEv_cW9d9jNxzUmzW04l/s320/sinn-fein-thomas-gould-cork.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sinn Féin TDs: Children of a Lesser God?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
There is a strange unanimity current in Irish political media at the moment. Unanimity would be odd at the best of times; these are not the best of times. Nevertheless, an accepted wisdom has developed, and this accepted wisdom can be summed up in four points.<br />
<br />
First, the next government will a coalition dominated by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Second, there is no possible alternative to this arrangement. Third, it is the patriotic duty of certain smaller parties in the Dáil to make up the numbers in this coalition, and finally, there’s nothing very, very odd about points one to three as outlined.<br />
<br />
The absence of any “now, wait a minute” impulse in all this is surprising. For instance, Pat Leahy of the Irish Times has written about <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/pat-leahy-small-parties-seem-intent-on-fleeing-from-government-1.4220090">the gulf in understanding</a> between what the politicians thought the last election was about and what the people thought the last election was about. The politicians thought the election would be dominated by Brexit, and how things would break between Fine Gael’s expert handing of these delicate tripartite negotiations between Ireland, Britain and the EU, or else Fianna Fáil’s nobility and patriotism in giving Fine Gael a free hand to do what needed to be done.<br />
<br />
The people, in their ingratitude, insisted on making the election about housing and health, subjects that were that much more real to the people’s own day-to-day lives and experiences.<br />
<br />
The election was a reality-check for political consensus. Why, then, is it business as usual for the political establishment? Why isn't so shocking a result having a tangible effect in terms of governance?<br />
<br />
One of the more thoughtful pro-Brexit arguments among our neighbours was the idea that, be it for good or for ill, the people had spoken. You may not like what they said, or you may be horrified by what they had said, but that they had spoken could not be denied. If Britain were a democracy, then politicians had no option but to accept the expressed will of the people.<br />
<br />
There are not many buyers for that notion of accepting the expressed will of the people in - hateful phrase! - Official Ireland. Half a million citizens voted Sinn Féin in the general election. Where are those voices finding expression currently? Where is the pundit telling a Prime Time presenter that there is something wrong in the denial of that mandate? Where are the articles speaking for those half-million?<br />
<br />
There are complexities to the situation. Governments are formed by seat-counts, rather than vote-counts, and if Sinn Féin did not run enough candidates to maximise their incredible vote, that is Sinn Féin’s problem and not anyone else’s. Of course this is true. But it doesn’t explain why Fianna Fáil’s 37 seats – not counting the Ceann Comhairle – count and Sinn Féin’s 37 seats do not, or why Fine Gael’s 35 seats count, and Sinn Féin’s do not.<br />
<br />
The political commentary is reminiscent of the late Archbishop of Dublin, Most Rev John Charles McQuaid, preaching that nothing had changed after Vatican II. The 2020 general election voting was so revolutionary that the political correspondents are struggling to process it, and are trying to deal with it by pretending it never happened at all.<br />
<br />
This is very dangerous thinking. If the election has been rendered null and void by COVID-19 fair enough; let’s have another election, and settle it that way. What’s completely out of the question is this ideas of ignoring the result of the election entirely. Ignoring the <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">result of the election</span> is a sure-fire confirmation that some people’s worst suspicions about the state are true.<br />
<br />
Specifically, the suspicion that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, that there is a permanent government that doesn’t change, and that permanent government is run by faceless figures who are members of clubs to which you can never belong.<br />
<br />
There was one particular factor in the last election that should have made all psephologists sit up and take notice. All through the history of the state, the Irish electorate has placed personality above politics. The Irish electorate votes locally first, nationally second. That’s why politicians attend so many funerals. If they don’t attend funerals, people won’t get to know them, and if they’re not known, they won’t get elected.<br />
<br />
That went out of the window in the 2020 election. Sinn Féin had a TD elected in Kildare who went on her holidays instead of canvassing. Sinn Féin did not just get a blown-in elected in Clare, but a candidate who had blown in from Dublin. Dublin!<br />
<br />
And these patterns repeated across the country. It’s all very well for pol corrs to be briefed by special advisors with stories about Shinners with <a href="https://youtu.be/BUm70U47mhE">British scalps around their tummy and pockets full of stolen money</a> over big plates of Comeragh Hill lamb, spring vegetables and beautiful barley marjoram sauce. But it's too late to go bitching about the Shinners now.<br />
<br />
Those Sinn Féin votes were cast all across the country, north, south, east and west, by rich people and poor people, by country people and townies, by people with nothing in common except a feeling that something has very wrong in a country where you obey all the rules and can’t afford a house for you and your family.<br />
<br />
Politics is a contact sport and high-mindedness is a poor shield, but good God, how can so seismic a mandate be ignored? It is natural that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael would seek to conserve their power – even if it is a little disappointing that there isn’t even some slight acknowledgement of how things have changed – but for the press, whose job it is to hold these jokers to account, to normalize Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael marginalizing of Sinn Féin’s democratically-expressed mandate is noticeably pathetic.<br />
<br />
What should be particularly worrying is the question of how the half-million who voted for Sinn Féin will take the ignoring of their expressed wish and the confirmation of their worst fears. The guess here is: badly. Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind, and we might all be destroyed in the coming storm.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-1663513933156120782020-04-06T09:00:00.000+01:002020-04-06T09:00:00.178+01:00On the Current Dáil Arithmetic<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghdzvABgbpXXy6fkl9YW90Yw1jUGwR_QvWdc27FbYmhpxVP_fbEGFtHwdDnQJWPzqshfrjxKyQpqshMpUA3Tm2MfW4YILHW9oOjsVONuSH_EcE3Yc_HWMKrUj-xtpV6JPZdd0w/s1600/leo_varadkar_micheal_martin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="330" data-original-width="620" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghdzvABgbpXXy6fkl9YW90Yw1jUGwR_QvWdc27FbYmhpxVP_fbEGFtHwdDnQJWPzqshfrjxKyQpqshMpUA3Tm2MfW4YILHW9oOjsVONuSH_EcE3Yc_HWMKrUj-xtpV6JPZdd0w/s320/leo_varadkar_micheal_martin.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Buddy Movie Government</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/pat-leahy-small-parties-seem-intent-on-fleeing-from-government-1.4220090">Irish Times reported on Saturday</a> that national peril sees the two great houses of Irish politics prepared from ancient grudge to break new unity in order to gift the country with the government it so richly deserves. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are on the verge of agreeing a program for government. What was not reported was the difference this makes as regards the current Dáil arithmetic.<br />
<br />
The awkward reality is that it makes no difference at all. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael can agree on a program for government down to the last jot and they would still be eight votes short of a majority. And the nature of a majority is that you either have it or you don’t. On or off, one or zero. There are no in-betweens. There are no almosts, but not quites. You are there, or you ain’t.<br />
<br />
Both parties are furiously briefing currently that if only those damned Greens would get with the program and do what they’re damn-well told the country would finally have a government to tackle the three-headed monster of Covid-19, Brexit negotiations and the EU’s upcoming revision of member-state corporation tax policy.<br />
<br />
There is an implicit understanding in this story that the smaller parties should bow to the larger for that reason – that they are small and the larger parties are large. However, the last government saw power handed to Shane Ross and Katherine Zappone that was out of proportion to their parliamentary representation, and what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.<br />
<br />
The Green Party – because things do hinge on the Green Party, currently – realise that to hold the balance of power is to hold all the power, and they are correct in that assessment.<br />
<br />
There is a thought experiment in the new maths of Game Theory that illustrates this quite well. Suppose a genie pops from a bottle and tells you that you can have one million dollars if and only if your buddy Frankie says it’s OK. How much of the million dollars do you have to give Frankie to get him onside?<br />
<br />
Some people think a few grand will do Frankie just fine. He’s going from zero dollars to a few grand, the price of a new Beamer, maybe – what’s not to like? It’s not like your own soon-to-be great wealth is any skin off Frankie’s nose.<br />
<br />
But this is incorrect. Frankie is in exactly the same position as you are, even though the money is offered to you alone. The offer to you does not reflect the true state of things – without Frankie’s participation, there is no money.<br />
<br />
The offer appears to be made to you alone, but that appearance is not the reality. You alone do not have the power to make the offer come true. Therefore, Frankie must get half of the money because without Frankie, there is no money at all. And once that penny drops for Frankie, he’s damned if he’s settling for one penny less.<br />
<br />
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are in the position of the person who thinks she’s been offered a million dollars. She thinks it’s hers, but it’s not. The prize is only there if another party gives its permission. No permission, no nothing. Zero. Zip. The null set. The what-is-not.<br />
<br />
Are the Greens correct to hold this position? Of course they are. Everyone in the Dáil can hold any position they like and, God help us, some of them actually do.<br />
<br />
In what way is the Greens’ position – which is, if I understand it correctly, that a government of national unity has to be formed to get us through the current crisis and then another election held as soon as it’s feasible – less reasonable than that of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael in their refusal to countenance anything to do with Sinn Féin? The teasing out of that question is what will decide the formation of the next government. Provided there’s a country left to govern, of course.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-51561417468924678012020-02-04T09:00:00.000+00:002020-02-04T09:00:02.806+00:00What Are, Aren't, and Should Be Major Issues in the Election<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Saturday will be, we are told, a "change" election, after which things will never be the same again. This is not the country’s first "change" election. The post-bailout 2011 election was a change election. So was the 1997 Deep Bertie election, and the Spring Tide election of 1992, and the Rise of the PDs in 1987. We could go on back to the 1920s, always finding the repeating pattern of things changing in order that they may remain the same, like in that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leopard">Italian novel</a>.<br />
<br />
The PDs won fourteen seats in 1987. The Labour Party won more than twice as many in 1992. Those are historical elections now; is it possible that it is the children of those who voted PD in 1987 and Labour in 1992 who are now going to vote Green and/or Sinn Féin?<br />
<br />
For a country that so enjoys an election, we seem unusually poor at documenting and/or analysing our politics. Why have we had so many change elections in the past thirty years?<br />
<br />
Some people are claiming that that the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael duopoly is finally over. They said that in 1987 too. Like the life of novelist Mark Twain or the fate of the Irish language, reports of the duopoly’s demise have been premature before.<br />
<br />
Why, though? Why is that? Why are there these sudden lurches among the electorate, from the right-wing PDs to the softish-left social democrats of Labour to the – to borrow a phrase from Seán Lemass about the origins of his own party – slightly-constitutional Shinners?<br />
<br />
Don’t forget, there is nobody more surprised at this Shinner surge – if it is a surge, and not another false dawn – than the Shinners themselves. Up until ten days ago, Sinn Féin were about consolidating the seats they hold, and trying to shore up leaks. Now they’re getting their ears boxed in the media for not running enough candidates, when one month ago it looked like they might be running too many.<br />
<br />
It’s a cliche of politics to talk about a gap between the elected and the elected, between the people and the elite. But my goodness, we had a Dáil declaring a climate emergency at the same time as rural Ireland was getting ready to picket meat factories and hold up traffic in Dublin over the destruction of a way of life that some feel the Green Party are only interesting in accelerating.<br />
<br />
There used to be a tradition of match-making in Ireland. Were any matched couples such strangers to each other as the current elected and the current electorate?<br />
<br />
What even is it that we do when do we go to vote? It’s not something that we really document. The weight of scholarly work on Irish politics seems to have been a series of laments and jeremiads about how awful it was that Irish politics did not operate along a left-right divide, thus shaming Irish academics when they attended conferences (in such socialist states as East Germany, Cuba and the USSR, funnily enough). Would it not have made more sense to document politics as they were, rather than as academics would have had them be?<br />
<br />
Are we better at understanding Irish politics now, or worse? Where is the great study, for instance, in the rise of the Independents in recent years? Nineteen independents were elected to the 32nd Dáil. There’s a good chance that number will be higher after Saturday and whenever the Tipperary election is finally held.<br />
<br />
What does a vote for an independent say about that independent’s voters’ views on how the country should be governed? Why does a TD who was voted <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/oireachtas/lowry-says-he-is-not-a-criminal-as-motion-of-censure-is-passed-1.560033">unfit for office</a> by his fellow parliamentarians continue to top the poll in his own constituency?<br />
<br />
Whose job is it to tease these issues out? It is the media’s job to tease these issues out. Why don’t the media tease these issues out? The media defence is that these issues are not teased out because the public isn’t interested in teasing them out – that the public likes sausages but cares little about how sausages are made.<br />
<br />
To which there are two responses. The first is that distinguishing between the public interest and what the public is interested in is meant to be a cardinal concern of a responsible media, not least when the primary media outlet, RTÉ, is a public-service broadcaster.<br />
<br />
The other response is that the media has no problem in the world in featuring issues about which the public could care less, the recent climate emergency business being a case in point. Which is more important? Why not devote even half of the resources devoted to climate issues to electoral reform issues? It doesn’t make sense.<br />
<br />
And here’s what makes least sense of all. This is another change election. The most seismic election in the history of this, or any other, state was in 2011.<br />
<br />
Fianna Fáil, the party that ruled the state from three of every four years of the state’s existence, went from seventy-one seats to twenty as an outraged and furious electorate blamed them for everything that had gone wrong in the country since the 2008 global financial crash.<br />
<br />
And now, nine years later, Fianna Fáil will be back in power. They won’t have seventy-one seats, but they look good for sixty, give or take. How has that happened? Was the crash as bad as it was made out to be? If it wasn’t, why did the people get the impression that it was?<br />
<br />
Either the media made fools of themselves by saying the crash was going to be far worse than it was, or else Ireland, that dear little island of green, has pulled off a bigger economic miracle than West Germany pulled off in the 1950s. Which is it? How did it happen? Who is to praise? Who is to blame? And where do I go to read about it?<br />
<br />
You may think the answers to these questions – just how bad was the crash? How did we recover? Have we recovered at all, or are we simply on the batter again and there’s an even worse hangover waiting around the turn? - would be front and centre in the election campaign, with politicians and pundits making cases pro and con different interpretations of recent history.<br />
<br />
You would be wrong. These have not been issues in the campaign. At all. And it’s going to be change elections all the way to the horizon and the nation going around in ever-decreasing circles until we start asking ourselves these questions, and paying attention to the answers.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-80768348145209032052020-01-02T09:00:00.000+00:002020-01-02T09:01:57.678+00:00The Year in Sports<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Shane Lowry was, naturally, a popular choice for RTÉ’s Sports Personality of the Year. The nation sees itself in Lowry – smashing them off the tee, showing nerves of ice on the green, and lorrying porter on the 19th. Fine girl you are.<br />
<br />
He wasn’t the right choice though. The Sports Personality of the Year Award should have gone to Stephen Cluxton, goalkeeper of the Dublin football team that won an unprecedented five All-Ireland titles in a row.<br />
<br />
That there wasn’t more talk of it is a reflection of Lowry’s popularity, and the fact that Lowry’s own GAA-credentials are first class. But it was still the wrong decision.<br />
<br />
If not naming Cluxton footballer of the year earlier, or not naming him as the All-Star goalkeeper earlier, were scandalous, then how much more scandalous was the lack of acknowledgement of the great gouges in the history books with which Dublin have carved their names? And how often can it be that one team can be summed up in one player, a rock on which all subsequent edifices are built?<br />
And how often do we see a player absolutely redefine the very concept of his position, as Cluxton has done?<br />
<br />
There are two arguments contra Cluxton. The first is that Sports Personality of the Year is an annual award, rather than a body-of-work award. The second is that Lowry’s achievement in winning the British Open was greater than Cluxton’s in winning five All-Ireland titles in a row.<br />
<br />
The first argument is bogus, because annual awards are about bodies of work as much as they’re about any particular year. Did Paul Newman win an Oscar for <i>The Color of Money </i>because <i>Color of Money </i>a better film than <i>The Hustler</i>, say, or because Newman acted better in <i>The Color of Money </i>than in <i>The Hustler</i>? Was John Wayne really better in <i>True Grit </i>than he was in <i>The Searchers </i>or <i>The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance</i>? Come on, now.<br />
<br />
We’re on trickier ground when we come to comparing sports, of course. Lowry is the third Irishman to win the British Open. Five straight All-Irelands have never been won before, and there were some pretty good teams that won four. Five was beyond all of them.<br />
<br />
And then the third and, for your correspondent, clinching argument. This year is the 35th running of the RTÉ Sports Personality of the Year. Lowry is the ninth golfer to win it. No Gaelic footballer has ever won it. Bejabbers, but the nation must be fierce gone on the golf all the same.<br />
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<br />
And speaking of rugby, there was some harrumphing about no rugby player having been nominated for that Sports Personality list this year, harrumphing that was easily silenced by asking who, exactly, had covered himself in glory in the year gone by.<br />
<br />
Rugby is in a strange place right now. If, as its critics would argue, every game outside of a World Cup match is a friendly, then international rugby becomes the Brigadoon of sports, rising from the mist only every now and again. And the worst thing for rugby is that scheduling is the least of its worries.<br />
<br />
Nearly a quarter-century from the advent of professionalism, the new reality hasn’t bedded in at all. Players are torn by the competing demands of club and country, the need to physically survive so attritional a game, and the hope that they won’t end up in homes for the bewildered in their old age, their brains having been battered about like Moore St oranges for ten or fifteen years.<br />
<br />
In praising the new breed of lock forward in his <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2019-12-29/sport/pioneer-brodie-retallick-has-led-revolution-in-engine-room-nhc27r6hc">Sunday Times column</a>, Stuart Barnes put his finger on another problem of the game, which is its increasing homogeny. Rugby used to be a game of many dimensions, with room for big men, small men, fat men and thin men.<br />
<br />
Now, like motor cars, science sees us thundering towards the one streamlined super-player, fast enough to be a back, strong enough to be forward, and all looking the same from one to fifteen. If the players are all the same then the gamed will be all the same and the élan and artistry and sheer drama that international rugby served up for over one hundred years will all be lost and gone with the wind.<br />
<br />
Not that you’d know that from the rugby press here. Your faithful correspondent was rather taken aback as different rugby scribes aimed kicks at Joe Schmidt once Schmidt was safely on a plane to the other side of the world and couldn’t hold it against them. The start of the Andy Farrell reign, where the <a href="https://www.rugbypass.com/news/andy-farrells-first-media-engagement-as-ireland-boss-wasnt-all-plain-sailing-as-irfu-excluded-certain-media/">IRFU gave the press a list of list of approved journalists</a> and press accepted being dictated to like lambs and slaves, is not a hopeful sign. It’s the job of the media to tell the people what’s going on. It’s not the job of the media to act as an adjunct of the IRFU’s PR department.<br />
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<br />
The story of the decade of course is the one that can’t be reported. The FAI are fifty-million Euro in debt, and they say they don’t know how it happened. How can you end up in a fifty-five million Euro hole unbeknownst to you? Fifty-five million is a considerable amount of potatoes. If you were five million in the red, you’d say things were bad. Fifty-five million is Department of Health level stuff. Complete systems failure.<br />
<br />
And the public will, as is traditional in the land of Erin, be the last to know. The top brass of the FAI has had legal eagles ready to swoop at any vague hints that there might be funny business going on for the past twenty years and it is a fact that Irish libel laws protect and favour the interests of the strong over those of the weak.<br />
<br />
Don’t think that anybody will see prison bars over this either. We don’t do white-collar crime well in Ireland, I’m afraid. The FAI will probably be bailed out by a government too chicken to let nature take its course. Small fry will be put on the dole as a result of that bailout, but the parties responsible will pack up and move to retirement in sunny Spain, and get season tickets for Barca, maybe. It stinks, and it’ll continue to stink for quite some time.<br />
<br />
Happy New Year.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-30135396530906067252019-12-30T09:00:00.000+00:002019-12-30T15:31:33.401+00:00An A-Z of the Past Decade in Mayo Football<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Your faithful correspondent was flattered and delighted to be asked to add his two cents to the </i>Western People<i>'s recent magnificent tribute to the Mayo footballers of the past decade, published about two months ago now. Here now are those two cents, with nothing added or taken away. Or hardly anything. Ahem.</i><br />
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<b>A is for Ardour</b><br />
It’s reasonable to wonder why we do it. Mayo people think we’re great at football but three All-Irelands in 130 years isn’t quite Liverpool’s Glory Years in Europe. But you can’t choose whom, or what, you love. Mayo are ours and we theirs and the GAA senior football team is our morning and evening star, whether we like it not.<br />
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<b>B is for Bowe's</b><br />
John Gunnigan, the man behind the <a href="https://mayogaablog.com/">Mayo GAA Blog</a>, decided to hold a sort of a Mayo pre-match party on the eve of the All-Ireland semi-final of 2011. We all knew Mayo were going to lose in the morning, but Gunnigan thought it important to mark how far the team had travelled from losing to Sligo and Longford the year before. And so, visits to Bowe’s of Fleet Street became a pre-match institution as this remarkable decade rolled on. The night before the 2013 Final it felt like Mayo’s Age of Aquarius had dawned in that area of Dublin bounded by College Green in the south and the river in the north. It didn’t last, of course, but it was magical while it was there.<br />
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<b>C is for Cork</b><br />
Younger readers may not remember what a bogey team for Mayo Cork were. Cork beat Mayo in the 1989 final, but the humiliation of Cork beating Mayo by 5-15 to 0-10 in the 1993 semi-final particularly stung. It looked like business as usual in the early minutes of the 2011 quarter-final, and the pundits’ pre-match mockery of Mayo was going to prove all too true. Then Aidan O’Shea cleaned Noel O’Leary, Kevin McLoughlin stuck a goal and history changed. Mayo met Cork again in the quarter-finals of 2014, and won a game by a one-point margin that felt like six or seven. As someone remarked at the time, “isn’t it nice to be the bullies for a change?”<br />
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<b>D is for Donegal</b><br />
Mayo played Donegal in the Championship four times this decade, and won three out of four games. But the one game of those four, the one Donegal won, is the only one that’s carved in stone. In the Championship, when you win is often more important than whom you beat, or how often, or by how much.<br />
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<b>E is for Egg-Chasing</b><br />
Every hardcore GAA club member treats rugby like a black-widow spider. They don’t want it about the place and if there’s any hint of an infestation, it’s all hands to the pumps until the crisis is dealt with. This is a little paranoid, not least because it’s not at all obvious that the IRFU wants its base to be widened as much as young people in non-rugby country want to play the game. However. There is one egg of which the GAA should be much more wary, and that is the Sherrin KB Size 5 ball used by the <a href="https://www.afl.com.au/">Australian Football League</a>. It’s very hard to expect any young man to turn down the offer of Australia and our blessings and best wishes to all to take their chance when it comes but goodness gracious, it’s middling heartbreaking for those who are left behind.<br />
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<b>F is for Forwards, Quality Scoring</b> <br />
Well, Bernard Flynn, or Dessie Dolan, or Tommy “Tom” Carr, or whoever, why do you think Mayo didn’t win the All-Ireland this year? I’m glad you asked me that Joanne – I think that it’s mainly due to a lack of quality scoring forwards. This summer, Cillian O’Connor surpassed Colm “Gooch” Cooper’s career scoring total. O’Connor is twenty-seven years old. Why not think about that one for a while Bernie, or Dessie, or Tommy?<br />
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<b>G is for Galway</b><br />
You could make a case that the best Mayo team of the first Maughan era was the 1998 team. But no-one would ever know because that team didn’t last past the month of May, beaten by Galway in Castlebar before the schools had closed for the summer. The hero of that Galway generation has just been appointed Galway manager. The prospect of history repeating is not a pleasing one.<br />
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<b>H is for Heraclitus</b><br />
Over two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted that a fire is always changing, and yet is always the same. It’s the same with the Mayo team. There’s been some talk in the media about the “end” of Mayo. Teams don’t end. Mayo will have a team in the Championship as long as there is a championship. Always changing, always the same.<br />
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<b>I is for Insult</b><br />
The first your correspondent ever heard of the so-called Mayo curse was outside the Big Tree after Mayo were hammered in the 2004 Final. There is no way between Hell and Bethlehem it’s been around since 1951, because if it was I’d have heard of it before then. I don’t know who started the curse story first, but if he, she, it or them ever has the lard beaten out of him, her, it or them by stout men with sally rods, that’ll be fine by me.<br />
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<b>J is for Jackeen</b><br />
In discussing Gaelic games with Dublin supporters, it’s essential to point out that the nickname “Jackeen” comes from the vast amount of Union Jack flags the city-that-took-on-an-empire hung all over the metropolis for the visit of King Edward VII in 1903. It drives them demented. Demented.<br />
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<b>K is for Kerry</b><br />
If you’re playing serious football, you’re measuring yourself against Kerry. Over this decade Mayo went from cannon-fodder in 2011 to equals in 2014 to victors in 2017. It was hard luck on Aidan O’Shea, but when Kieran Donaghy boxed O’Shea in the dying minutes of the All-Ireland semi-final replay, we knew the Kingdom was done when that was all they had left. Anything that happened in that oul’ Super-Eights stuff isn’t right Championship at all, you know. Ahem.<br />
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<b>L is for Limerick</b><br />
The city of the ancient walls and the broken treaty stone will always have unhappy memories for Mayo. The 2014 semi-final replay should never have been played in Limerick, and the County Board were chicken not to stand their ground. The match had spectacular levels of drama and was a classic for Kerrymen and for neutrals, but none of that is worth yesterday’s chewing gum when it’s your team that gets knocked out.<br />
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<b>M is for Money</b><br />
It got lost in the coverage of Ireland’s hammering at the hands of New Zealand in Tokyo, but that same day saw a special congress of the GAA introduce a two-tier system to the Championship. They say it’s to give smaller counties a chance. It’s not. No law was ever made for the poor. It’s another step on the road to professionalism, along which the GAA has already travelled a perilously long way. In trying to mimic other sports, the GAA is in grave danger of losing that thing that makes it unique and unparalleled. God forfend the unhappy day. <br />
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<b>N is for Newbridge</b><br />
Stephen Rochford’s tenure as Mayo manager ended in loss to Kildare in Newbridge. Newbridge hadn’t been awarded the fixture when the draw was made but Kildare kicked up, the country got behind them and they claimed their reward. This column looks forward to Kildare showing similar gumption the next time the current Leinster and All-Ireland Champions tell them there’s no room for Dublin’s massive travelling support in Newbridge.<br />
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<b>O is for Overseas</b><br />
People used to say that what goes on tour, stays on tour. That was pre-social media. Anybody involved in sports, on either the playing or administrative side of things, should have the fact that the world is now a village tattooed on the palms of their hands, for fear they’d forget it while dazzled by the bright lights and make jack-asses out of themselves and all belonging to them.<br />
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<b>P is for Propaganda</b><br />
History is written by victors. The narrative of the 2017 final is a case in point. That game is remembered for its ending – Lee Keegan chucking his GPS-tracker in the general direction of Dean Rock before Dean Rock kicked the winning free. Except that wasn’t the ending. The ending was when all three of the Dublin fullback line dragged down their men as David Clarke was taking the kickout, ensuring that there was no short kickout option. Did the referee issue three black cards? He didn’t even blow his whistle. Did anybody go bananas in the RTÉ studio or in the papers afterwards? Not at all. After all, Dublin winning All-Irelands is good for the game. Future Mayo teams should always remember what it’s like to be disrespected. It’ll help concentrate their minds.<br />
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<b>Q is for Quest</b><br />
A year or two ago, a friend was stuck in traffic on the way home from one of those indeterminable qualifier fixtures and was surprised to find himself not caring. He saw the cars stretch fore and aft of him, all bedecked in colours, all in common cause, and he was washed over with feelings of camaraderie and fellowship. Reader, when you can’t remember the years or the opposition or the players’ names, you’ll remember that feeling and many like it from these golden years.<br />
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<b>R is for Reek, The</b><br />
In the dying years of the Twentieth Century, between the All-Ireland final of 1996 and its replay, some Ballinamen climbed Croagh Patrick. One of them looked down from the summit, turned to his fellows and asked “how can anywhere this beautiful not win an All-Ireland?” Some mysteries pass all understanding.<br />
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<b>S is for Sam</b><br />
S is for Sam, S-A-M, Sam. Accept no substitutes.<br />
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<b>T is for Tickets</b><br />
It’s never been easy to get a ticket to an All-Ireland final. I know a man who knows a man who met a man who heard of a man on a lock-in in Kilkenny some years ago, when the hurlers were unbeatable. He and his fellow zombies regained consciousness sometime around midday and, while searching his pockets for any money he might have left, he found a ticket for the hurling final that was on that very day. He held it up, and got a laugh from the boys. If he had done that in Mayo, it wouldn’t have been a laugh he’d have gotten. It’d have been a spin in an ambulance.<br />
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<b>U is for Ululation</b><br />
Ululation is the sound of sorrow vocalised, from the Latin <i>ululo</i> – I shriek, I yell, I howl. We are more inclined to describe that sound as “keening” in Ireland, but Kerry have already taken K – just like they take anything else that isn’t nailed down if you don’t keep your two eyes on them.<br />
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<b>V is for Victory</b><br />
Mayo won three national titles in this decade. The minors won in 2013, the Under-21s in 2016, and the seniors won the League this year. Had those victories occurred in any other generation, there would be statues chiselled and songs sung. But they happened in the shadow of this extraordinary decade, and thus didn’t get what they might otherwise have gotten.<br />
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<b>W is for Winter</b><br />
Andy Moran retired this year, as did Ger Cafferkey. Alan Dillon hung up his boots a year or two before that, and there will be more to come. It’s sad that neither Andy nor Alan nor Ger won an All-Ireland, but is any sadder than the fact that Ciarán McDonald didn’t, or Liam McHale, or Willie Joe Padden, or any of the countless others? Winter is what it is, and we must accept it.<br />
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<b>X is for X-Marks-The-Spot</b><br />
Fifty-three degrees, forty-four minutes, thirty-one-point-seven seconds North, seven degrees, fifty-five minutes, three-point-five seconds West. Those are the exact co-ordinates where Sam will cross from Leinster into Connacht on his way to Castlebar if they’re travelling by bus. It’ll be 53 degrees, 25 minutes 43.8 seconds North, seven degrees, 57 minutes and 38 seconds West if they take the train. Some of us have been planning ahead.<br />
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<b>Y is for Youth</b><br />
The fire is always the same, and always changing. Youth must be given its fling. There are footballers coming into their prime now who know of no other Mayo than the one that plays in Croke Park as leaves turn on the trees and they take up the torch in their turn.<br />
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<b>Z is for Zzzz’s</b><br />
Of which there are only <strike>sixty-one</strike> thirteen left until Mayo's first game of the FBD League in dear old Caisleán a'Bharraigh. Can’t wait.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-11685789188145856712019-09-30T09:00:00.000+01:002019-09-30T09:00:06.463+01:00Schadenfreude and the Irish Rugby Team<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The Irish rugby establishment suffered two traumatic events on Saturday. The first was the defeat of the national team – the No 1 team in the world, twenty-two-point favourites on the day – by hosts Japan at the Rugby World Cup. The second was that news that no small proportion of the nation were delighted to see Japan win.<br />
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It was the second event that was the more traumatic. It was like when a relationship breaks up. You thought she loved you; turns out, you make her sick. That’s not easy to get the head around.<br />
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There is a certain amount of begrudgery, of course, a defining Irish characteristic if ever there was one. There’s always been a demographic who despise rugby and all who play it.<br />
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These are the people who insist on referring to Autumn Internationals as “friendlies,” and dismiss Six Nations games as not counting because they’re not the World Cup. They’re never going to happy, and their contribution is best ignored.<br />
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It’s the public that took real pride in the achievements of the rugby team who are now turning away from it that should concern the IRFU. The IRFU have always been a little … peculiar in the matter of rugby evangelisation. It’s something that they may come to regret.<br />
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There is an opinion among rugby-haters that rugby is despised because only a certain class play it. That isn’t true. Irish people have always had an affection for rugby, often in places where the game is as alien as cricket or baseball.<br />
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Ollie Campbell tells a story in Tom English’s magisterial oral history of Irish rugby, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Borders-Playing-Ireland-Behind/dp/1909715468/ref=sr_1_3?adgrpid=59260185115&gclid=Cj0KCQjwrMHsBRCIARIsAFgSeI0ZIq3AuJo8wTpFmobncHRkcDHCO_4m9x2HVSdMErkfTDglPmW6ds8aAl4OEALw_wcB&hvadid=291404333207&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1007850&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t1&hvqmt=e&hvrand=4385873473088915124&hvtargid=kwd-308758830616&hydadcr=8243_1757001&keywords=no+borders+tom+english&qid=1569787436&sr=8-3">No Borders</a>, of Campbell’s car breaking down somewhere in Connemara, and of his getting a lift to a garage from a nun.<br />
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The nun had no interest in rugby, but the Ward-vs-Campbell was at its zenith at the time. Ward-vs-Campbell was part of the national conversation, one of those things on which everyone has an opinion.<br />
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This particular nun considered it shocking that the IRFU wouldn’t give that nice Mr Ward a go. She had no idea who Campbell was but Campbell did the only thing he could, and agreed wholeheartedly with her.<br />
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The eighties are far distant now, and the rugby of that era seems as dated as old black-and-white newsreel footage of FA Cup games featuring Blackpool or Preston North End from before the war. There was no need to tell the nation that Campbell and Co represented the “Team of Us” – it was written in every line of their faces.<br />
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Rugby was, famously, a game for all sizes. Irish people could look at the team and see the nation in all its complexity and diversity, before diversity became a thing.<br />
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There were tall men and short men, fat men and thin men, scrawny men about whom you worried would have violence done to them, and other men on whom you could count to do violence unto the other crowd. But only when they were looking for it, mind. Peaceable ould souls otherwise.<br />
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Rugby was enjoyed by Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter, at a time when those distinctions were matters of life and death. English’s book deals quite sensitively with those divisions, which were dealt with without any ersatz anthems having to be invented to paper over cracks.<br />
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And somewhere along the line that connection was broken. A lot of people no longer make that connection between the team and the nation.<br />
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Professionalism is a part of it. Rugby was a very easy to game to understand – you won if you hit them harder than they hit you. That’s not the case any more. Rugby is now decided in the breakdown, which can only be properly understood by watching tape with coaches and having a very good eye for body positioning and the physics of the lever.<br />
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I remember Donncha O’Callaghan talking about how much of his game – tackling and clearing out rucks – was just a job, like any other job, and I remember thinking: how sad. It’s meant to be a game. It’s not meant to be just another job.<br />
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Rugby at the moment is in a strange place in its evolution. Ireland, by luck rather than judgement, found itself perfectly suited to the professional setup when the IRFU realised that the provinces, rather the clubs, were the future.<br />
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Other countries have been less lucky, none more so than France, where the demands of the French clubs have reduced the fighting cocks of the national team to feather dusters.<br />
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And what’s most bizarre of all, in Ireland especially, is that there is no discussion of these changes. For the Irish rugby community, the people who would recognise Ollie Campbell at the bottom of a meadow, it’s business as usual, except that Ireland is top dog now, instead of cannon fodder.<br />
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Other than that, it’s all as it ever was, with clients to entertain at the England game and tickets to dump on one’s underlings when Italy or Samoa are in town.<br />
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Every year the GAA displays its anguished breast at the professional creep into both hurling and football, and problems with the game of football and with the Championship setup.<br />
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In rugby – nothing. The sound of silence permeates the halls, except for the intermittent thunk of a passport being stamped and some hired gun being handed a backstory about how much he loves Guinness’s porter, Kerrygold butter and Father Ted.<br />
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Reader, do you remember that Irish-by-birth-Munster-by-the-grace-of-God stuff we used to hear in the early 2000s? We don’t hear it so much now, with Munster not having the same schools feeder system as Leinster or Ulster and having to go shopping for players, just like an English soccer team. And that’s fine, in its way, but it is remarkable that nobody ever writes about it.<br />
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Nobody ever writes an op-ed saying that for him or her the Munster experience has been cheapened because Limerick isn’t to the fore as it was. There are some op-eds about members of the Irish team that are not Irish, but as everybody is doing it – and none more blatantly or disgracefully than New Zealand, the greatest rugby nation in the world – the writers can perhaps excused that. But ordinary people, who cheer the jersey first and the game second, really aren’t happy about it.<br />
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The amateur ethos enveloping the professional game has created a disconnect between the Irish team and the people who are not heartland rugby people. Heartland rugby people, the people who should be evangelising the game in written and broadcast media, don’t address what happened to Munster-by-the-grace-of-God or the ethics of foreign players wearing the emerald green.<br />
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Rugby pundits are far more interested in disappearing into an increasingly isolated world of jackals winning first-phase ball and dynamic offloading. The people are wondering why if Paddy Jackson or Seán O’Brien ever went on a night out with their Irish team-mates and what exactly those nights out were like. It would be odd if they didn’t, wouldn’t it?<br />
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When Ireland lost to Japan, did anyone wonder if maybe somebody shouldn’t give Paddy or Seán a bell, in this hour of direst emergency? How would the rugby world react? Would fans book tickets home? Would writers they no longer recognise the team? Or would they suck it up and parrot the parrot line?<br />
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Increasingly, that’s going to be more and more up to themselves. The nation is looking at rugby and thinking: it’s not me that’s changed. It’s you. I just don’t know who you are any more.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-91905153875893384142019-08-29T09:00:00.000+01:002019-08-29T09:00:03.281+01:00The Gospel According to Darragh<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This column likes to consider itself second-to-none in its admiration of Darragh Ó Sé’s weekly column on Gaelic Football, published every Wednesday by the Irish Times during the Championship.<br />
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Yesterday, in his preview of Sunday’s All-Ireland Final, where only Kerry remain standing in the way of a historic five-in-a-row titles for Dublin, Darragh presented <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/darragh-%C3%B3-s%C3%A9-the-heart-says-kerry-the-head-says-cop-on-to-yourself-1.3999218">his masterpiece</a>.<br />
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This may not have been obvious on first reading of the column. Some prophets are born to shoot from the hip. John the Baptist made it quite plain to Israel that the new covenant was at hand. Roy Keane, in those happy times when he annually righted the nation’s wrong as part of his charity work for the Irish Guide Dogs Association, and before the misery of his having to put his money where his mouth is began, was of the same school. Seán Báiste and The Boy Roy both gave it to us straight.<br />
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Darragh’s is of a different style. Darragh’s way is more subtle, more gnostic, more allegorical. Darragh’s is the way of parable and imagery. He is more in the tradition of Jeremiah or of that other John, servant of Jesus Christ, to whom was granted the Apocalypse.<br />
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To truly read Darragh we must engage in exegesis. We must carefully parse the text in order to lead out its true meaning.<br />
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As we consider Darragh’s column of yesterday, we note that it begins with a parable, The Parable of the Bomber. On the face of it, it’s a reminiscence of the two big men exchanging bantz before the 2009 final, and very middling bantz they are. But reader, shun the easy path. Look more closely. Ignore the instruments. Feel the Force.<br />
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Darragh decides to have a bit of fun, but the bit of fun he has – “as long as the three Sés are in it” – isn’t actually funny. So why tell the story? Because the prophet is telling his followers, lo, remember, I am Darragh the Trickster. I like to have a bit of fun. My words are not as they seem.<br />
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The next section is pure stodge, with a lot of old yak about the Killarney Races and the Rose of Tralee and how training is different from Darragh’s day. This is to scare of the unwary, who will lose the will to go on. The true followers continue, however, knowing the House of Wisdom is only reached after wading through the swamp.<br />
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And then, through the mist, we espy the first turret of that same house. “The one thing I’ve noticed this year with Dublin is that Jim Gavin seems to have settled on a team and more or less stuck with it.”<br />
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“The one thing I’ve noticed.” It’s straight out of Columbo. Just as the murderer thinks he’s got away with it, the LAPD ragamuffin says “there’s just one thing that’s been bothering me …”<br />
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Jim Gavin’s is a settled team, muses Darragh. In other years they chopped and changed. Not this year. The competition for places isn’t the same.<br />
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Dublin were training in Cooraclare, but Darragh is not at all sure they were going hammer and tongs at it. They’re well used to this, says Darragh.<br />
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Reader, does that sound at all like the Comfort Zone to you? Could Dublin be … complacent? Could Dublin be … stale? If Darragh were as his forebears, a voice clamouring in the desert, his acolytes’ ears would be pricking up big style at this stage.<br />
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Then Darragh remarks that, while caution may have got you to an All-Ireland final, an All-Ireland Final itself is a place in which to throw caution to the wind. “A final is a place to be borderline reckless in,” remarks Darragh, almost as an aside.<br />
<br />
Reader, think back to the Parable of the Bomber. Of the nine (nine!) All-Ireland Finals in which he played, which one did Darragh discuss with the Bomber? It was 2009. Was anyone “borderline reckless” in 2009, borderline reckless in a way that would lead to the winning of the game? Reader, that sonorous booming noise in the distance is not the ringing of a marriage bell. It is the sound of the Prophet dropping a hint.<br />
<br />
Having dropped that hint, the Prophet goes on to disrobe, oil up, and start whacking that great big gong that used to start some British movies in the 1950s, the better for his followers to pay attention.<br />
Mayo caned Dublin in the first half of their semi-final, Darragh points out, but did not make it count on the scoreboard. The boy-king Clifford, Stephen O’Brien or that Geaney fella won’t be missing many from twenty-five yards, and Dublin have been slow starters this season.<br />
<br />
His colours nailed to the mast, Darragh re-vests and ladles on the yerra, in case the Empire have sent their spies. He tells a Parable of Jacko, yea, and then he goeth even further unto the praising of the Dubs. He points out that Dublin are so strong that Eoghan O’Gara probably won’t make the 26-man cut. Golly. A team must be good if not even Eoghan O’Gara can make the grade.<br />
<br />
Kerry's price had held steady at 9/2 since the semi-finals, but it went out to 5/1 with Paddy Power yesterday. The price went on the board just as Darragh was published, but before he had yet been digested. Reader, I fell it on like a thunderbolt. <i>Adveniat regnum</i>.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-86279518218911629232019-08-06T09:00:00.000+01:002019-08-06T09:00:04.285+01:00The Hateful Eights<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwWc5kiYjxFQHyHntWI6cXqRotVnj_nDoBTmlelYlyZqmFPkp5M0U_SLaNDA-q_FnWjcYnSyYPpJjpjopqREfFMjFc1qKnkmZn2RO0025yTmMCAwSuz3TOXnnZ6Mxpx5jX4bZh/s1600/dublin_tyrone_2019_diarmuid_connolly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Filleann Rí a'Chnoic" border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="615" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwWc5kiYjxFQHyHntWI6cXqRotVnj_nDoBTmlelYlyZqmFPkp5M0U_SLaNDA-q_FnWjcYnSyYPpJjpjopqREfFMjFc1qKnkmZn2RO0025yTmMCAwSuz3TOXnnZ6Mxpx5jX4bZh/s320/dublin_tyrone_2019_diarmuid_connolly.jpg" title="Filleann Rí a'Chnoic" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Filleann Rí a'Chnoic</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In his match report from the ballroom dancing in Omagh on Sunday, the Irish Times’s <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/dublin-win-phoney-war-now-let-s-never-speak-of-it-again-1.3977144">Malachy Clerkin</a> enjoins us never to speak of this again. If only, Malachy. If only.<br />
<br />
Sadly, it’s all too necessary to speak of it. The match in Omagh was the Super 8s equivalent of <a href="https://youtu.be/pUp-_pGZYVA">Old Shep</a> being taken to the vet and the vet, on completing his examination, saying “I can’t do no more for him Jim.”<br />
<br />
The GAA has no option now but to pick up its gun and send the Super 8s to half-witted-ideas heaven, where it may rest easy with the remixed Sunday Game theme tune, hurling gloves and the B-Championship.<br />
<br />
How did this mess come about? Money, of course. For some reason, without any resolution being passed by Congress or any of that palaver, the GAA accepted a change to its fundamental identity in the past decade or so.<br />
<br />
Instead of being an organisation that would offer an opportunity to play Gaelic Games to as many people as wanted to, the GAA decided it was in the sports entertainment business. Just like the Premier League, or European Championship Rugby, or even the MMA, the supreme sports entertainment product of our times.<br />
<br />
There wasn’t a need to put motions before Congress. This sort of an idea is one of those you circulate at social functions, and let it go viral. There was an obvious gateway – the burning desire of the Gael to believe we’re just as good as the soccer/rugby/Brazilian Ju-Jitsu crowd.<br />
<br />
Reader, do you know the absolute favourite story of any good Gael? It’s the one where Sir Alex Ferguson, or Bill Belichick, or Richie MacCaw is shown footage of some football or, ideally, hurling game and Sir Alex/Belichick/Richie are suitably impressed. But then, the kicker.<br />
<br />
Whoever has provided the footage tells Sir Alex/Belichick/Richie that the players are all amateurs, every one. And Sir Alex faints, or has a heart attack. Belichick goes mad, and has to be taken to a home. Richie has to have a cavity block smashed over his head to calm him down, being driven demented by the news that amateurs could produce such sporting beauty.<br />
<br />
Screw you, Team of Us.<br />
<br />
Of course, once you get into the sports entertainment game, you find yourself always worrying that you’re a bit short on Product. Content is King. Give the people what they want. So we need to find a way to dig up more matches, somehow.<br />
<br />
Lightning strikes in hurling. The provincial championships change from a dead weight to a Philosophers’ Stone, as a round robin format suddenly finds matches bursting out all over. A round robin doesn’t sit so well with the football formats, so what else to do but force it?<br />
<br />
Hence, the Super 8s. For the Super 8s to work, there had to be eight teams of about the same level every year, or four in every five years, say; a combination of the provincial Championships and the open-draw qualifier system had to be the best means of identifying those teams, and each of the eight teams had to play one home game, one away game and one game at a neutral venue.<br />
<br />
Advocates of the Super 8s may argue that the way things have fallen out are just unlucky. The happenstance of Dublin’s current dominance, how a little tweaking can make all the difference, and so on. It’s all blather.<br />
<br />
The idea of the Super 8s is inherently flawed on two levels. On the most superficial level, it’s flawed because a competition can be a league or it can be knockout, but it can’t be both. The backdoor stretches the credibility of the knockout format to its elastic limit, but it doesn’t quite break it.<br />
<br />
The Super 8s shatters the knockout idea into dust. Championship means do-or-die. It does not mean Dublin and Tyrone holding a seventy-minute teddy-bears’ picnic on the August Bank Holiday weekend.<br />
<br />
The more fundamental problem is the nature of GAA itself, and this redefinition by stealth that it’s up to. The increased number of games was the expeditionary force. The special congress in the winter when they try to introduce a tiered Championship will be the tanks crashing through the walls.<br />
<br />
The GAA is not, and should not be, in the product-selling business. Its purpose is to provide the opportunity to play Gaelic games to as many people as want them. Watching Fat Tony hauling his great tub of guts over and back some god-forsaken field on the side of a mountain might not be up there with watching Lionel Messi at the Bernabeu in terms of sports-entertainment-product, but dammit, running around that field means a lot to Fat Tony. And the GAA is made up of thousands and thousands of Fat Tonys.<br />
<br />
There is an argument about the amount of training put in by senior inter-county players in the modern era. Firstly, nobody’s making them. It’s not like there’s a GAA-Stasi kicking players’ doors down in the middle of the night and checking their carb intake.<br />
<br />
Secondly – and nobody finds this more bizarre than your correspondent – people in Ireland now routinely put in that sort of training because they like it. They like it. People run Ironman and Ironwomen competitions all the time, but there’s no idea that the nation somehow owes them something because of it. It’s quite easy to remain dry-eyed at the more heart-rending tales of woe from the GPA and their acolytes if you grant yourself a little perspective.<br />
<br />
For all that, the genie is so long out of the bottle that the situation can’t return to what it was. The GAA was the sport of a poor country, and Ireland isn’t a poor country any more. Money is more important now that it’s plentiful than it was when it was scarce and the GAA can only exist in the real world.<br />
<br />
Therefore, a modest proposal. Let the GAA meet its need for more product by expanding the League. Address the current inequality by having more teams in Division 1, broken into two conferences, as the Examiner’s Kieran Shannon has been preaching for so many years. And satisfy the need for more product by doubling or even trebling the number of League games.<br />
<br />
Return the Championship to provincially-based single-knockout games, and run it off quickly the summer. The people will quickly choose whether they like the professional league or the amateur championship, and let the cards fall where they may.<br />
<br />
It may be the end of the GAA as we know it. It may be that the GAA as we knew it has been gone for some years. But at least we’ll find out, one way or the other.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-22943088352167112582019-05-06T10:00:00.000+01:002019-05-06T10:00:03.172+01:00So. Farewell then, Eugene McGee, Conqueror of the Conqueror of the World<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmH5K9udf8eM1eWUSsVLT0HMVwbp4_x3mUnZAsAwahaFpmOLKpqqyBCqM-FpkyiLeFKrdwYgXukYao4ZCxfl2StfOLKKA_sslGVXVW0ck_E-lG95swryzQmIKp1jG244Rgomvs/s1600/eugene_mcgee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="615" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmH5K9udf8eM1eWUSsVLT0HMVwbp4_x3mUnZAsAwahaFpmOLKpqqyBCqM-FpkyiLeFKrdwYgXukYao4ZCxfl2StfOLKKA_sslGVXVW0ck_E-lG95swryzQmIKp1jG244Rgomvs/s320/eugene_mcgee.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Buaiteoir Buaiteora an Domhain</i></td></tr>
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Alexander II, Tsar of all the Russias, described the Duke of Wellington as the “conqueror of the conqueror of the world” after Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. And it’s a fitting epitaph also for Eugene McGee, who died suddenly on Sunday morning.</div>
<br />
McGee was a complex man. One of the greatest Gaelic football managers, while one of its worst players. A sometimes dour, if not downright rude, man who could inspire fierce loyalty. A pundit who was at once blinkered and revolutionary.<br />
<br />
But whatever else is said or written of the man, and for all the great and terrible personal loss he is for his family, Eugene McGee will forever be associated with 1982, and the greatest All-Ireland football final the nation has ever seen.<br />
<br />
We are lucky that, in an Association whose dedication to preserving its own history is spotty at best, we have a marvellous document of that Offaly team, their spectacular act of giant-killing, and a Kerry Golden Generation that came back from that defeat to become even more lustrous than before. It is <a href="https://www.obrien.ie/kings-of-september">Kings of September</a> by Michael Foley, and it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Ireland. Essential reading.<br />
<br />
McGee is not noted as a Gaelic football tactician, as Jim McGuinness or Mickey Harte are. He liked his football, to use his own phrase, “tough, but manly.” Both Roy Keane and Graeme Souness have been preaching the worth of getting to the damn ball and worrying about tactics later in another code. McGee was of their church.<br />
<br />
So was he lucky, or was he good? The results are there. Mick O’Dwyer conquered the world, and McGee conquered Dwyer. McGee was successful with UCD in Sigerson football, Offaly in senior inter-county, and even in International Rules, back when the Australians cared in the ‘eighties. (After an Irish triumph, some Australians believed that the Irish had an advantage because the game was played with a round ball. McGee was asked if he thought the Australians would have won if the games were played with the Australian oval ball. “We’d have won playing with a square ball,” spat McGee).<br />
<br />
McGee was a proponent of the black card and the qualifier system, and was wrong on both counts in the opinion of the current writer. He believed that the first step to professionalism in the GAA came with sponsored jerseys, and was correct, again in the opinion of the current writer.<br />
<br />
But that’s all these things are; opinions. The man’s record cannot be denied, and neither can the personality, the cut, the gimp of the man. He was proudly rural in a way that didn’t even allow for a rural-urban debate. He was who he was, and he made neither bones nor apologies about it.<br />
<br />
It is possible that, reading the eulogies today, some misfortunate sophist with a algorithm where his or her soul ought to be will sit down and watch a tape of that 1982 final. He’ll see a game played on a wet day, with poor fitness levels compared to modern standards, poor skill levels compared to modern standards, and a game in which the best team did not win.<br />
<br />
Reader, pity that man. There are those who would look on a rose and see only a bush, or hear a symphony and hear only noise.<br />
<br />
The scientific approach to sport has its place, of course, but if it reigns supreme then sport becomes just another job, with carefully measured outputs and inputs and strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats.<br />
<br />
It’s the sheer human drama of sports that compels, as players battle skills, yes, but also bravery and courage and the huge hand of Fate itself.<br />
<br />
Sport is at once serious and trivial. Winning the All-Ireland is the most important thing in the year, after everything else, like births, marriages and deaths. There is a ceiling to how much sport can be parsed.<br />
<br />
A wise and thoughtful friend of the blog cried when Kerry lost in 1982. He believed in merit as a child, and that the best team should win. And if that game between Kerry and Offaly were played ten times, Kerry would win it nine times. Of course they would. But the game was played only once, and Kerry didn’t win it. Offaly did, in the most unforgettable moment in Irish sport.<br />
<br />
That could not have happened without Eugene McGee. Offaly went one stage further in the Championship every year he was in charge until they won the entire thing, and they did it at that turning point in history when the greatest team of all time were set to collect the uncollectable crown.<br />
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If that’s not the very illustration of the sublime, what is? And none of it could have happened without Eugene McGee, now called Home to his Reward. <i>Suaimhneas síoraí dó, agus go raibh príomh-áit aige i nDáil na Laochra Gael.</i>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-60051272306797463642019-04-30T09:00:00.000+01:002019-04-30T09:00:10.980+01:00All-Ireland Football Championship 2019 Preview<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiayFdR-EBJ6ZF6Fp6lpAOq2ZQ3w3MSDzFKOSUe1c59Q4d8Q3VGw-nU3q4LFrSsXpKJ4hlc4NKATbZyNQdDZjsD15q1Yj2oCt2w8131Y4jsYoiAAiRJg137nrog0qyYYsZEY9MA/s1600/dublin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="620" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiayFdR-EBJ6ZF6Fp6lpAOq2ZQ3w3MSDzFKOSUe1c59Q4d8Q3VGw-nU3q4LFrSsXpKJ4hlc4NKATbZyNQdDZjsD15q1Yj2oCt2w8131Y4jsYoiAAiRJg137nrog0qyYYsZEY9MA/s320/dublin.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Dublin are odds-on favourites to win their fifth title in a row, an achievement that would make them the greatest GAA team of all time, football or hurling. They would be the only team to achieve that feat, and that therefore makes them the best. Of course it does.<br />
<br />
Of course, they would not be a sensible investment. An odd-on price is never a sensible bet in multi-horse field, even if there are fewer horses running in the race than you might prefer.<br />
<br />
Your correspondent is inclined to take League form with a pinch of salt, but what was interesting about Dublin in the League wasn’t so much the results as the sudden loss of appetite. Dublin in their pomp revelled in burying teams. This new, steady-as-she-goes approach ill-suits them. Seeing them like this is like calling into the local and seeing the local Champion <a href="https://youtu.be/bC-_WdYu2AI">Pintman</a> not only drinking tay, but drinking it out of a cup and saucer. Has the world changed, or is he only doing the dog?<br />
<br />
There is an opinion abroad that Dublin could get broadsided in Leinster. Delicious though this prospect would be, it’s impossible to make a case for any other Leinster team doing anything other than falling valiantly. In recent years, it’s only Westmeath that have really put it up to the Dubs, but they’ve never had the sort of playing resources that Meath or Kildare or even Offaly once enjoyed. The pick of the three wouldn’t keep it kicked out to Dublin now.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMsXYNTeFRB7URVQ79a2Kw_WrPZVKM1dTdWhg8HZ33YEPflIvhw3GuE5So7CaJbyfww9uP5rLRof_pY0vvvwQ5Zj-xMjZ5-8tTcRIGnEhta-bkwb6xBPtIQLDNaVCVi82o1lwJ/s1600/kerry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="481" data-original-width="620" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMsXYNTeFRB7URVQ79a2Kw_WrPZVKM1dTdWhg8HZ33YEPflIvhw3GuE5So7CaJbyfww9uP5rLRof_pY0vvvwQ5Zj-xMjZ5-8tTcRIGnEhta-bkwb6xBPtIQLDNaVCVi82o1lwJ/s200/kerry.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
A shrewd eye should be kept on Kerry. There was much made of how immature Kerry looked against Mayo in the League final, but you can grow faster in football years than you can in actual years. Seán O’Shea will only be a few months older come the summer than he was in that League final, but he’ll be carrying scar tissue that will stand to him in bigger battles to come.<br />
<br />
How long it takes him and others to toughen up will determine how quickly it takes Kerry to win their next All-Ireland. It is not impossible it may happen sooner than we would have thought when the final whistle blew in that League Final.<br />
<br />
The hardest challenge to the Dublin imperium will come from the North, as usual. The Ulster Championship is easily the most competitive, and perhaps it’s because of this that a dumping into the qualifiers seems to knock Ulster teams less out of their stride than others.<br />
<br />
The leading hounds of Ulster are Monaghan, Tyrone and Donegal. Monaghan had a stinker of a league, and did well not to get relegated in the end. This, after beating Dublin in the first game and being hailed by some critics as the second best team in Ireland.<br />
<br />
The reason why Monaghan had such a poor League isn’t obvious. But it’s difficult to believe that so valiant a team as we’ve known Monaghan to be in recent years have just suddenly thrown in the towel. The suspicion here is that it would be unwise to dismiss the Farney challenge without further intelligence.<br />
<br />
Donegal and Tyrone have been praised for their league performances, and praise has been grudgingly given to those counties in recent years. It’s interesting that the praise heaped on the counties is at odds with the rumours drifting from the camps, about players not happy about playing for their particular managers and other stories of internal strife and woe.<br />
<br />
Try though I might, I can’t force myself to believe that Tyrone have found a Philosopher’s Stone to take them one further than last year’s All-Ireland Final loss where, in truth, they never really competed. You have the players or you don’t, and Tyrone, for all Mickey Harte’s in-game tactical ability, seem one or two players short.<br />
<br />
Donegal are blessed with the best player in the country, Michael Murphy, and will always be a threat while that man can pull on a jersey and answer Tír Chonnail’s dread war cry. The more help he has the greater Donegal’s chance becomes.<br />
<br />
Galway were the darlings of the League last year, only to again disappoint in Dublin in the summertime. That Galway reign as kings of Connacht is beyond dispute and, should they face Mayo in a Connacht semi-final as many expect, they will enjoy home advantage at the butt of the broad Atlantic, also known as Stáid an Phiarsaigh, Bóthar na Trá. Kevin Comer’s absence continues, which has to be a source of worry.<br />
<br />
Again, the word on the wind is that Comer is one of these players who is more than just another member of the team – he is seen, subconsciously at least, as the avatar of the Galway football tradition, and as such he cannot be replaced.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgczVs1N4gijRMmTycLdo_zZw5vgfn1cPvyavDq94tDDFiVKZSRuAGBz1oyXhmyJZSHVJzFbGl8Sif4AFvpjHd5Lb5zwqOZ-zDw7jrBCficPvFuNu_fVBPXfunEIqutB5R44Nel/s1600/galway.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="615" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgczVs1N4gijRMmTycLdo_zZw5vgfn1cPvyavDq94tDDFiVKZSRuAGBz1oyXhmyJZSHVJzFbGl8Sif4AFvpjHd5Lb5zwqOZ-zDw7jrBCficPvFuNu_fVBPXfunEIqutB5R44Nel/s200/galway.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
For all that, Galway are spoiled with talent, and learning all the time. Last year there were rumours of difficulty in integrating the Corofin players into the county team. That was noted, and the two teams have been bonding since the start of the year. Almost violently so if rumours of a January challenge match are to be believed, but then, people do like to tell stories.<br />
<br />
Your correspondent’s friends insist to him that being afraid of Galway is like being afraid of the dark – an immature, childish terror, not borne out by scientific evidence. Right. Tell that to me again when we’re stuck in traffic for two hours on the Grattan Road after Galway pox a seventy-eighth minute winner over Mayo and we’re all thinking things can’t get any worse, only to see great Cthulhu himself rise up out of Galway Bay, release an eldritch roar, and make a beeline for the Róisín Dubh, foul tentacles thrashing the sea into foam around him. I’ll remember to laugh.<br />
<br />
You may notice that there is one contender that remains unnamed. The reality is that Mayo have bounced back so high from taking the road from Newbridge to Nowhere last year that any attempt at rational thought on the part of any Mayo man, woman or child in the matter of football is now quite out of the question.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj3OKgg8GETi_GVezpSb-PkSUoTD42iisLeIpidUAOUzmBNWWaIlEZqWr0otoaqsWbzhOePwvzmqA0qLqmoztcfqPbtnyj_gfOCm1aG_F_TPu8JoGme2ACnzGWpp6GbK_O9iic/s1600/mayo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="285" data-original-width="390" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj3OKgg8GETi_GVezpSb-PkSUoTD42iisLeIpidUAOUzmBNWWaIlEZqWr0otoaqsWbzhOePwvzmqA0qLqmoztcfqPbtnyj_gfOCm1aG_F_TPu8JoGme2ACnzGWpp6GbK_O9iic/s200/mayo.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
In her beautiful sonnet, <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/love-not-all-sonnet-xxx">Love is Not All</a>, poet Edna St Vincent Millay remarks that, in a difficult hour, she may be tempted to sell your love for peace, or the memory of this night for food. Your correspondent would sell a damn sight more than that to see Diarmuid O’Connor lift Sam in the Hogan Stand on the first of September, and is unable to sensibly contemplate even the notion of it without either fainting or going insane.<br />
<br />
For that reason then, I predict that not only will Dublin not win five-in-a-row, they won’t even reach the final. The final will be a repeat of the 2000 final, a draw between Kerry and Galway, and I’m danged if I know who’ll win the replay.<br />
<br />
If anybody’s in Castlebar on the night of September 2nd, by the way, I’ll either be in Byrne’s, McHale’s, or above in a tree somewhere, looing. Up Mayo.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-17862089522715918882019-04-19T12:16:00.001+01:002019-04-19T12:16:53.506+01:00Dealing with Today's Protest in Dublin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis_uWWkRggAOlQE2vhqgsbnEN5K3_lE0Cuww3qhERYCYkZ3GaE8cP1Z-3myUqzg3e0bCwz2RTS5aIoBVmTkvujgUumkg0h4fnwnfLwZ8P-1zVr-p4rsAWgmdEBF4-QPD30yJVw/s1600/extinction-rebellion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="485" data-original-width="970" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis_uWWkRggAOlQE2vhqgsbnEN5K3_lE0Cuww3qhERYCYkZ3GaE8cP1Z-3myUqzg3e0bCwz2RTS5aIoBVmTkvujgUumkg0h4fnwnfLwZ8P-1zVr-p4rsAWgmdEBF4-QPD30yJVw/s320/extinction-rebellion.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Dublin city centre is due to be thrown into chaos for God-knows how long from lunchtime this afternoon due to a protest organised by a group called “Extinction Rebellion Ireland,” and the authorities seem incapable of addressing the issue. Your faithful correspondent returns to his escritoire, then, to see what suggestions he can make to help.<br />
<br />
A spokesman for Extinction Rebellion Ireland, a Doctor Ciarán O’Carroll, is quoted in this morning’s <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/climate-change-protest-to-disrupt-business-as-usual-on-o-connell-street-today-1.3864956">Irish Times</a> as saying that they “have no choice” but to throttle traffic in the city-centre at the start of the only four-day bank-holiday in the year.<br />
<br />
“We have tried marching, and lobbying, and signing petitions,” the doctor tells the Times. “Nothing has brought about the change that is needed. And no damage that we incur can compare to the criminal inaction of the Irish Government in the face of climate and ecological breakdown.”<br />
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It’s a funny thing that, what with this being the only choice left to them, and they having worn themselves out marching, and lobbying, and signing petitions, that so very few people have heard of Doctor O’Carroll and Extinction Rebellion Ireland before. It’s odd also that the Irish Times did not put this question to Doctor O’Carroll – if Extinction Rebellion Ireland have been doing all this marching, lobbying and petition, why is the only hearing of it now? Have they not heard of Twitter? Or even, God help us, the ‘gram?<br />
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As a scientist, your faithful correspondent has to admit that it's entirely possible that all this has been going without my noticing it. I struggle to keep up with pop culture - until very recently I thought Drake was a gentleman duck, for instance.<br />
<br />
So, in the interest of giving Extinction Rebellion Ireland a fair shake, I looked them up in Google Trends. In Ireland over the past ninety days, Extinction Rebellion Ireland have been of more interest than "hemorrhoid ointment", but not as much interest as "soda bread recipe." Here's the chart:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiYEOYzvfpOTjmFSnYKFb68kQfUw7R_aQRHUl2VLXV56FCW9ZIi8jP0hLMXJgUakmTOBG35oH3_QZrIcFwg1JPlU7ylyuAQG1psOdQEKhdsyRsJ57jxU_YMN51IzkGvXLTVbba/s1600/google_trends.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="747" data-original-width="1600" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiYEOYzvfpOTjmFSnYKFb68kQfUw7R_aQRHUl2VLXV56FCW9ZIi8jP0hLMXJgUakmTOBG35oH3_QZrIcFwg1JPlU7ylyuAQG1psOdQEKhdsyRsJ57jxU_YMN51IzkGvXLTVbba/s320/google_trends.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /><br />But the politics of all this are for another day. Right now the city has to deal with the fact that an enormous public nuisance is going to be caused in the city centre this afternoon and the city has a duty to protect its citizens from that enormous public nuisance. Extinction Rebellion Ireland’s right to protest does not override every citizen’s right to travel across the city as she wishes.<br />
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What, then, is to be done? Slooshing the protesters off the bridge with water cannon is the first and obvious solution. A joyous idea, and one sure to be popular with the people slowly roasting in their cars, but unfortunately not practical.<br />
<br />
Just as a tackler in rugby has a duty of care to the player he tackles in the air landing safely on the ground, so the moral water cannon operator has a duty of care to those whom he scrubs from the pavement. The protest will centre on O’Connell Bridge, and it’s impossible to guarantee against one of these wretches going into the Liffey and drowning for the cause. This would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed, and so we must think of Plan B.<br />
<br />
Plan B is to simply arrest the bums and cart them off to the barracks. Unfortunately, the contemporaneous situation in London, where protestors are also vigilantly acting the bollocks, suggests that being arrested is exactly what the protestors want. Therefore, the city should use the water cannon and let Extinction Rebellion Ireland chance Anna Livia’s cold embrace before playing into their hands.<br />
<br />
Happily, there is Plan C – or B+, if you’re feeling witty.<br />
<br />
Plan B+ is to arrest the protestors as before, but rather than cart them off to the Bridewell or Pearse Street cop shop, they are simply taken to the Papal Cross in the Phoenix Park and released into the wild, to gambol with the deer or make their way back into the city as they please.<br />
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The Phoenix Park, as readers may be aware, is not small. No buses run by the Papal Cross and there is no way out except on foot. Those Extinction Rebellion Ireland members who wish to return to the fray are, of course, entirely free to do so, but if they do it, they will have to do it on foot. An hour’s forced march back to the bridge may take some of the pep from their step and make them wonder if there really isn’t one more petition that they could sign that could yet win the day.<br />
<br />
And when the rebels get to O’Connell Bridge, if it is the case that the protest is still going on, it’s simple enough to scoop them all up as before and spin them out again. Of course, each trip goes a little further than before. A Phoenix Park veteran can be dropped off to that green area in Cappagh Road, in Finglas, near the National Orthopaedic Hospital. After Cappagh, you get a spin out to Mulhuddart, say. And so on, and on, and on.<br />
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We could even have some sport on it, with Paddy Power making book on any activist being able to make it back to Dublin from west of the Shannon before midnight. Or Boyle's - we're neither snobs nor monopolists, you know.<br />
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It has long been the case that Dublin’s citizens are expected to put up with having their lives and business interrupted at the whim of any jackass with a bee in his bonnet. Maybe it’s time the city stopped being played for a chump for once, and gave those people who look for trouble exactly what it is they seek.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-6208154129028813192019-01-23T09:00:00.000+00:002019-01-23T09:00:02.992+00:00Members of the Oireachtas Have Nothing to Feel Smug About<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0yF5mBJqU69Zun9r0ADZ8xqBKTqUW9iN-IhweTrSCFyzzcBRkK0_pXGsLA-efx3_OcevEA0Nt3Nr3Rf2ajjCjG-58KVEa9_i34d7KS6iZMNldRBdGLBmvh0bZc0xea8fuPYY6/s1600/dail_centenary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0yF5mBJqU69Zun9r0ADZ8xqBKTqUW9iN-IhweTrSCFyzzcBRkK0_pXGsLA-efx3_OcevEA0Nt3Nr3Rf2ajjCjG-58KVEa9_i34d7KS6iZMNldRBdGLBmvh0bZc0xea8fuPYY6/s320/dail_centenary.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<i>It was around about the same time that UK prime minister Theresa May was in front of a baying House of Common. The contrast between this respectful celebration of 100 years of unbroken parliamentary democracy here </i>[sic]<i> and the shambles in London was not lost on the Dublin audience.</i><br />
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<i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_1873746957">Irish Times, Tue, Jan 22, 2019.</a></i></div>
<span id="goog_1873746959"></span><i></i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a><br />
It is the nature of the politician to be blessed with an above-average amount of self-regard. An adamantine hide is necessary in a life where you submit yourself to public judgement at least once every five years. However; the notion of the current members of the Oireachtas stiffening with pride at the thought that they are the finest of parliamentarians, not like those knuckle-dragging Tans across the way, is too much for even the most ravenous of goats to stomach.<br />
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One hundred years after the first sitting of Dáil Éireann, Ireland is a state where the Gardaí have merrily ignored 7,900 crimes, some of them very serious, over the past seven years. Nobody knows why these crimes have been ignored, but the GRA, the Garda Representative Association, has made it quite clear that however it happened it wasn't their boys' fault. It may turn out that dog ate each and every one of their notebooks. It’s what Mr S Holmes used to refer to as a three-pipe problem.<br />
<br />
This is the same police force who were discovered to have made up breathalyser tests, bullied whistleblowers out of the force and saw the last two Garda Commissioners and the last two Ministers for Justice resign under never-really-fully-explained circumstances. The police exist to enforce the law; what does the law currently mean to the police? It seems to them as a midge on a summer’s evening on the mountain; bothersome, but not really to be taken seriously.<br />
<br />
The situation is so worrying a man could end up in hospital as a result. Except that were he foolish enough to do so he might be better of going straight to the graveyard with his wooden overcoat on, such is the state of the Health Service.<br />
<br />
The current Minister for Health is - nominally, theoretically - in charge of a Health Service that is unable to diagnose cervical cancer and over-estimates the price of the new children's hospital by one billion Euro, and counting. That's not the price of the thing, remember; that's how much the original estimate differs from the current estimate, and it's gone up, rather than down.<br />
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How much is a billion Euro? It's enough to buy every single residential house in the town of Ballina, with about half of those in Castlebar thrown in as well. It's a lot of money, and yet the current Minister for Health, famously "mad as hell" about the cervical crisis, seems completely content to sign off on this bill, no matter how many more billions it goes up to. Don't forget either that this new hospital will not deliver one extra bed compared to the number of children’s beds currently available. Details!<br />
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One wonders what the Minister for Finance, Paschal Donohoe, thinks of all this. Paschal is one of the leading politicians in the country. He had enough nous to know that, as he himself could never become leader, his allying himself closely with Leo Varadkar once Varadkar made his run would make him the next-best thing. When appointed Minister for Finance, the cognoscenti thought of those many media performances where he smothered criticism of Fine Gael in the manner of a conscientious huntsman drowning surplus beagles, and thought: here is the man to keep an iron grip on the public finances.<br />
<br />
If only. The <a href="https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2018/1127/1013787-budget-fiscal-advisory-council/">Irish Fiscal Advisory Council responded to last year's budget</a> by accusing the government of repeating the mistakes of the past - over-heating an already-overheated economy, thus guaranteeing that the country will be once again on its uppers when the tide goes out again, as it inevitably must.<br />
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There is an irony in this as the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council was set specifically to perform this very task. One of the reasons identified for the crash of 2008 was that a "support the green jersey" policy blinded officials to their duty of telling the economic truth as it is, rather than as people wanted it to be. Thus when things went <i>splat!!</i>, there was no rainy-day money at all. Not behind the couch, not under the bed, not buried in the garden in a biscuit tin.<br />
<br />
And now, ten years later, we're doing it all again. The ambulance drivers struck yesterday. A nurses' strike is guaranteed. The teachers can't be far away from having the Art class studying Placarding 101. There's that monstrous, growing bill for the Children's Hospital collapsing into the weight of its own gravity like a fiscal black hole, set to swallow every single thing around it. And that's not even counting the six hundred million lids that the Health department was over budget last year, and for which money was found from .. well. We never do find out where this miracle money comes from, do we?<br />
<br />
And how does the political class respond to these triplicate impending disasters, to say nothing of Brexit itself, homelessness, the narrow tax base, the flight from rural Ireland? By poncing about the Mansion House telling each other how well they would have done at Soloheadbeg or Kilmichael had Fate not decided they would be born too late, and then off to Buswells, Kehoe's, Doheny's and sundry other houses to pint the night away.<br />
<br />
Brexit is a nightmare, but at least the British can see that there's a dirty big iceberg off the starboard bow and it could sink the whole ship. The first our politicians - and we the people, God help us, because it is us, after all, who are the ones who elect the donkeys in the first place – the first any of us will know about the iceberg is when we're clinging to a spar in the freezing Atlantic, watching the state go under once more, and asking ourselves: how the **** did that happen? It's a mystery alright, Paddy. Who could ever have seen that coming?An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-17180903318749599192018-12-17T09:00:00.000+00:002018-12-17T09:00:06.400+00:00The Year in Sports<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPScVQdbdUMW07-4xo3m-DmXISdIRslkLZGNBqFFAYCEID5ffEP3SzNoCI2SuqNuwzFZkmri9cnN0dUyjkZCvU_jDZKXdk-x27v6gWHKyIRrq7Sa0sLt8oC4L4Iy8O-m-xiXqs/s1600/dublin_james_mccarthy.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="If you want it, you'll have to fight for it." border="0" data-original-height="815" data-original-width="1433" height="113" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPScVQdbdUMW07-4xo3m-DmXISdIRslkLZGNBqFFAYCEID5ffEP3SzNoCI2SuqNuwzFZkmri9cnN0dUyjkZCvU_jDZKXdk-x27v6gWHKyIRrq7Sa0sLt8oC4L4Iy8O-m-xiXqs/s200/dublin_james_mccarthy.png" title="If you want it, you'll have to fight for it." width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>If you want it, you'll have to fight for it.</i></td></tr>
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Your bookmaker will return you fifty cent profit on every Euro you bet on Dublin if Dublin win five All-Ireland Football Championships in a row next year, something no county has achieved in football or hurling. How astonishing. And of course, the price is very hard to argue with. It is impossible to make a cogent case for any other county winning it, as each of the contenders has profound flaws and, while Dublin are by no means perfect, they are considerably better equipped to win than any other county.<br />
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For all that, your correspondent can’t get it out of his head that Dublin won’t do it. The pressure and hype will be bananas, as more and more entities see the chance of a quick buck and climb up onto an already-overloaded Dub bandwagon. Even though the new rules are for the league only, who knows what tiny cracks the League will reveal that could be torn open in the white heat of Championship. But most of all, the biggest struggle that Dublin will face to win five-in-a-row is the struggle all dynasties face – the fact that players get old.<br />
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This runs against conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is that Dublin have found the alchemist’s stone, and can regenerate players like no-one else has been able to before. Brian Fenton and Con O’Callaghan are cited as proof, the replacements that are better than what went before.<br />
<br />
And that’s all fine, but there are more constants over the four-in-a-row starting fifteen than you might think. Cluxton, obviously. But also Jonny Cooper, Philly McMahon, Cian O’Sullivan and James McCarthy. That’s a lot of backs, keeping a lot of pressure off Cluxton, who cares little for pressure. It will not be the shock of shocks if Dublin do win five-in-a-row, of course. But it won’t be as big a shock as some think if they don’t. After all, Kilkenny were meant to be able replenish their players at ease too, but when Jackie Tyrell and Tommy Walsh and Henry Shefflin went off into the sunset, things began to fall apart.<br />
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Of course, the monstrosity that is the Super Eight section of the Championship will do all in its power to preserve the powerful against the threat of the weak. Would anyone have heard of Mullinalaghta if there had been Super Eights in the Leinster Club Championship, or even in the Longford Club Championship?<br />
<br />
The Super Eights is a further betrayal of all the Championship stands for and should stand for, a point made time and again in this place. In many ways, the highlight of the summer was the sight of empty seats in Croke Park for the Super Eights, something that so shocked the grubby moneymen who are behind the thing that changes have already been made. Hopefully, it’s too late and the thing will be sent back to whatever hell from whence it rose.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhco6NqFriHF-mWLE6bOi1A-31zEBSXHzTM4HHRy2g1_MBmOd_qB8Fm6yqmp4ForGCVJF-L5J1Noa_A00CowUf2yQiE4H8In91lHfvTK8gJbhtTnrXUh-wsCjHjLQSbe79_u1Bp/s1600/limerick_shane_dowling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Shane Dowling. No better man." border="0" data-original-height="330" data-original-width="620" height="106" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhco6NqFriHF-mWLE6bOi1A-31zEBSXHzTM4HHRy2g1_MBmOd_qB8Fm6yqmp4ForGCVJF-L5J1Noa_A00CowUf2yQiE4H8In91lHfvTK8gJbhtTnrXUh-wsCjHjLQSbe79_u1Bp/s200/limerick_shane_dowling.jpg" title="" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Shane Dowling. No better man.</i></td></tr>
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Your correspondent is generally loathe to comment on hurling as I know enough about it to know I know very little about it, actually. I do know that the people of Limerick continue to float on a blissful cloud in this horrid winter weather and more power to them. But whether it’s my innate conservatism or not, I can’t help but be suspect of the provincial round robins.<br />
<br />
Heresy, I know. For those in Munster and Leinster – and even for people from Galway, I believe – these round-robin games seem to have been an unending series of delights. But for someone at a remove, it was a struggle to keep up and figure out exactly who is ahead and who is behind.<br />
But that’s what a great competition should do! is the response. Of course. But only up to a point. There has to be a narrative or else it’s all very hard to sort in your head. If every game is an epic then no game can be an epic.<br />
<br />
Someone remarked that Limerick’s win this year was actually the greatest win of all time as no other All-Ireland winner had to beat so many top-class teams to win the title. And that’s true, but it’s also true because no other teams had to – it used to be a knockout competition. Maybe, as time rolls on, we’ll get used to it. Maybe. But it’s very hard not to worry about hurling when people are spending a lot of money claiming to promote the game in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, when they don’t stir one princely finger to promote the game north of the M6 motorway. There is something here that doesn’t quite add up.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh895vtDJH9PqhtCU4lGhPAXGI1M02fJ0gZ89_CRmHhfLfxSxjSOYOTS1-o01iStRdWY6RIhQDmGhwxZqwrgag8veXyXtWurYviqNon4yPhaaA_a7AgngSM-CFiD3a9SEia6VTB/s1600/ireland_jacob_stockdale.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Jacobus Rex" border="0" data-original-height="337" data-original-width="600" height="111" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh895vtDJH9PqhtCU4lGhPAXGI1M02fJ0gZ89_CRmHhfLfxSxjSOYOTS1-o01iStRdWY6RIhQDmGhwxZqwrgag8veXyXtWurYviqNon4yPhaaA_a7AgngSM-CFiD3a9SEia6VTB/s200/ireland_jacob_stockdale.jpg" title="" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Jacobus Rex</i></td></tr>
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This was the greatest year in Irish international rugby history. Ireland won the Grand Slam, they won a southern hemisphere tour, and they beat New Zealand. Joe Schmidt is the best coach in the world, and Ireland have some of the best players in the world.<br />
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There are those who ask questions about friendlies and what will Ireland do in the World Cup. They don’t really want to know. Anyone who follows rugby knows the worth of what Ireland have achieved and anyone who doesn’t, probably doesn’t really want to in the first place, and is only looking for mischief.<br />
<br />
But as with football and hurling, dark clouds loom in the distance. The game is changing all the time. Professionalism is twenty years old now, and rugby is so different from what went before. Amateur rugby was a backs’ game of field position. Professional rugby is a forwards’ game of ball retention.<br />
<br />
The old order is under more and more strain because money wins every argument, and nothing that went before, as regards tradition or honour or how-we-do-things, can withstand money. Agustín Pichot, the former scrum-half for Argentina and now vice-chairman of World Rugby, has spoken of how the demands on players cannot be met in current circumstances, and he's right. Something's got to give, and some things already have.<br />
<br />
France was a rugby powerhouse once. Now, her clubs have strangled the life out of the national team. It may be Stockholm Syndrome, as no team found more ways to annually batter Ireland than the French did, but now they’re gone it feels like the game has lost something, and there is an empty space where those gallant prancing cocks used to be. It just doesn’t feel right.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNwcLSY5OQiHOnbxkj_LFPHdf36nG60Ra_W_IcolDRerojHn1-wwIxOx3fWKuBC5xJm0LG998oEMNcmTLVMZiYNU5Q8PMKFXRVWAPbKb3iAZj9sZpY0IPOn4Yw6iE6XUNZZDtq/s1600/tyson_fury.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNwcLSY5OQiHOnbxkj_LFPHdf36nG60Ra_W_IcolDRerojHn1-wwIxOx3fWKuBC5xJm0LG998oEMNcmTLVMZiYNU5Q8PMKFXRVWAPbKb3iAZj9sZpY0IPOn4Yw6iE6XUNZZDtq/s200/tyson_fury.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div>
<i>The best man in Ireland, England,</i></div>
<div>
<i>Scotland and Wales?</i></div>
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How wonderful it would be if Tyson Fury could save boxing. It is one of those things that is only obvious after it is pointed out that without a functional, competitive heavyweight division all other boxing divisions are somehow lessened. And now, thanks to this extraordinary man it may be saved.<br />
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It's a long path and it’s a lot to ask of Fury, who has his own demons to fight outside of the ring, but sport needs boxing. For a sport so easily corruptible, it is one of the noblest of sports in its way. I hope it can be saved in these changing times, and look forward to the rematch between Deontay Wilder and Fury with no little anticipation.<br />An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-7811883494057409232018-10-15T09:00:00.000+01:002018-10-15T09:00:04.113+01:00On Pride in the Nation<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd-GF_CMUAh4asuNor0b0BVXIM_HWrN9xSKWmPMzSK8Uu4-kKOimL2hWCGXuduXHZu6nd_4X4qlRL_xwx97CZ-eIc3rjKDVrDi0bDlXM-iA8-lcNjWln7sXFXJxFftEgXlKZ3B/s1600/presidentialDebate20181013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd-GF_CMUAh4asuNor0b0BVXIM_HWrN9xSKWmPMzSK8Uu4-kKOimL2hWCGXuduXHZu6nd_4X4qlRL_xwx97CZ-eIc3rjKDVrDi0bDlXM-iA8-lcNjWln7sXFXJxFftEgXlKZ3B/s320/presidentialDebate20181013.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
The <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2018-10-13/ireland/for-the-first-time-in-my-life-i-am-proud-to-be-irish-nzgtfw5dq">Times Ireland</a> published a column on Saturday in which Caroline O'Donoghue declared that, for the first time in her life, she is proud to be Irish. Your correspondent is damned if he can see why.<br />
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Right now the nation is blessed with a government that is looked down upon by other governments held together with baling twine, UHU glue and three rusty nails. The current government relies for its survival on Deputy Michael Lowry, TD, a deputy found guilty of incorrect tax returns this year and against whom a motion of censure was passed in 2011. Not what you'd call moral authority, as such.<br />
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The reason the government had to go cap in hand to Deputy Lowry in the first place is because it found itself one member short when Deputy Denis Naughten jumped before he was pushed over a number of undeclared dinners he enjoyed with one David McCourt, who represents the only bidder left standing in the "competition" to win the licence to rollout the National Broadband Plan.<br />
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Deputy Naughten received not-at-all common cross-party support for his principled decision to resign but, as Gavin Jennings pointed out on Morning Ireland on Friday, it is not at all clear why exactly Naughten had to go.<br />
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On the face of it, Denis Naughten had to go because had lunch with someone involved in a bidding process over which Naughten himself had the final decision. But the fact Naughten had lunched at least once with Mr McCourt was already known to An Taoiseach and in the public domain. So what, then, is the dining tipping point? At what point does a Minister become compromised?<br />
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Is she fine if she has two dinners, but damned after three? At what point in the third dinner does the bell toll? First bite? Last slug of brandy, last pull of the cigar? Or just at the point where the big pot of spuds is placed on the table, with the steam rising off them and everyone ready to reach in and grab?<br />
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The answer is, of course, that there is no point. There are no standards in Irish politics. There are only circumstances.<br />
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If the wind is behind you, you may do what you damn-well please. If it's not, you have to tread very carefully, for you will be as damned for permitting the building of the halting site as you will be for stopping it.<br />
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You have to tread so carefully, in fact, that the best thing to do is to close the door of the Ministerial office, put the feet up and sleep peacefully until the next election and/or reshuffle, whichever comes first, and it's time for some other silly bastard juggle live hand grenades. At least you've got the pension sorted.<br />
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The absence of standards in Irish public life is equally visible in the Presidential election. Firstly, in the quality of the candidates, which is of the póinín variety - that type of miserable potato more often thrown out to the chickens than offered to feed the family.<br />
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It is secondly reflected in the media's inability to make head nor tail of the campaign, other than writing <a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/columnists/alison-oconnor/questions-need-to-be-asked-of-journalists-love-in-with-michael-d-473327.html">thinky-thought pieces</a> beating the breast about the media's poor job in holding Michael D to the gas last time out, and promising to go harder this time - without actually going so far as to go harder, as such. All things considered, with prejudice to none.<br />
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And speaking of the First Citizen, An tUachtarán has decried black media coverage of his Presidency - being a poet, "black media" is Michael D's own coinage of "fake news," the pet term of one of his fellow Presidents - at his campaign launch. At no stage are the white media ever so base as to list what these horrid rumour are, or even ask him directly to answer them. That wouldn't be cricket.<br />
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However, when you spend as much time in the gutter as your correspondent, you get to hear a few things. Unless there is a rumour out there that has not come to the low haunts frequented by <i>Spailpíní Fhánacha</i>, Michael D has nothing to fear. It's not like he's done anything illegal or jeopardized the state. If the full story were to come out, it may not even cost him the election. If anything, it might even win him more votes.<br />
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And that's because nobody knows what "proper" behaviour is in Irish politics, because nobody has ever seen it, or expects to.<br />
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Ireland is not a democracy. It is a feudal system where chieftains gather to squabble over beads and trinkets to bring home to their own gullible followers, while making out like so many bandits themselves and laughing all the way to the bank. If this is the Ireland you're proud of you can have it. I myself am sick to my teeth of it, and I mourn all the blood it cost to build so base a state.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.com